Japan’s famously conscientious but overburdened baggage handlers will soon be joined by extra staff at Tokyo’s Haneda airport – although their new colleagues will need to take regular recharging breaks.

Japan Airlines will introduce humanoid robots on a trial basis from the beginning of May, with a view to deploying them permanently as a solution to the country’s chronic labour shortage.

The Chinese-made humanoids will move travellers’ luggage and cargo on the tarmac at Haneda, which handles more than 60 million passengers a year.

JAL and its partner in the initiative, Japan Airlines GMO Internet Group, hope the experiment – which ends in 2028 – will lessen the burden on human employees amid a surge in inbound tourism and forecasts of more severe labour shortages.

In a demonstration for the media this week, a 130cm-tall robot manufactured by Hangzhou-based Unitree was seen tentatively “pushing” cargo on to a conveyer belt next to a JAL passenger plane and waving to an unseen colleague.

The president of JAL Ground Service, Yoshiteru Suzuki, said using robots to perform physically demanding work would “inevitably reduce the burden on workers and provide significant benefits to employees”, according to the Kyodo news agency.

Suzuki added, however, that certain key tasks – such as safety management – would continue to be performed by humans.

Japan is struggling to cope with a simultaneous surge in tourists from overseas and an ageing, declining population.

More than 7 million people visited the country in the first two months of 2026, according to the Japan National Tourism Organisation, after a record 42.7 million last year, despite a drop in the number of visitors from China triggered by a diplomatic row between Tokyo and Beijing.

According to one estimate, Japan will need more than 6.5 million foreign workers in 2040 to reach its growth targets as the indigenous workforce continues to shrink. The country’s foreign population has risen dramatically in recent years, but the government is now under political pressure to rein in immigration.

The president of GMO AI and Robotics, Tomohiro Uchida, said: “While airports appear highly automated and standardised, their back-end operations still rely heavily on human labour and face serious labor shortages.”

Robots can operate continuously for two to three hours and the firms are planning to use them to perform other tasks, such as cleaning aircraft cabins.

The Guardian

Meta on Wednesday launched a new program aimed at luring top creators from TikTok and YouTube to Facebook, offering guaranteed pay and boosted reach.

The Creator Fast Track program offers social media stars with established followings guaranteed monthly payments and increased reach on Facebook. It pays $1,000 a month to creators with at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, and $3,000 a month to those with over a million followers on any of those platforms.

“We have heard from established creators on other platforms … that it can be hard or intimidating to get started,” Yair Livne, vice president of product for Facebook Creators told CNBC. “So this program is really meant to address that need.”

The guaranteed payments will only last three months, but Livne said creators will get access to Facebook’s Content Monetization program and will continue receiving a reach boost “in perpetuity.”

The announcement comes as Meta steps up its broader push to win over this segment of users.

The company said it paid nearly $3 billion to creators in 2025, up 35% from the previous year. About 60% of that total went to Reels content, with the rest split across other formats.

Facebook, while boasting over 3 billion users, has long struggled to attract creators, who have gravitated toward TikTok and YouTube. The program is the next step in a process to attract those with established audiences to help boost original content on Facebook.

To be eligible, creators need to share at least 15 Reels on Facebook within a 30-day period, posted on at least 10 different days. The content does not need to be exclusive to Facebook, but must be original to the creator, including AI-generated content. 

Creators can also earn on Facebook through subscriptions, tipping, brand deals and Facebook Content Monetization, a program that pays creators who meet certain requirements based on engagement across short and long videos, stories, photos and text posts.

Meta is also adding new metrics to Facebook Content Monetization to show creators which views qualify for payout, their approximate earnings rate and why certain views did not qualify.

“I just don’t think that a lot of creators today think about Facebook as the primary place they can go. But that itself actually creates this huge arbitrage opportunity,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on “The Colin and Samir Show” last March.

Zuckerberg said at the time he wanted to revive what he called the original spirit of Facebook, or “OG Facebook.”

Since then, the company debuted a Friends tab for more personal content and overhauled the way it pays creators, shifting from a revenue share model to one based on engagement.

Meta is betting that a mix of up-front payments and expanded distribution can help jump-start activity on Facebook, particularly as creators increasingly complain about inconsistent earnings across platforms.

“We really want every creator to see Facebook as a home for them and a necessary platform to be on,” Livne said. “We believe monetization is a big part of that story.”

CNBC

New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.

“There’s a big spectrum,” said Joe Kaufman, global head of privacy at Jumio, one of the largest digital identity-verification and authentication platforms. He explained that the patchwork of state laws vary in technical demands and compliance expectations. “The regulations are moving in many different directions at once,” he said.  

Social media company Discord announced plans in February to roll out mandatory age verification globally, which the company said would rely on verification methods designed so facial analysis occurs on a user’s device and submitted data would be deleted immediately. The proposal quickly drew backlash from users concerned about having to submit selfies or government IDs to access certain features, which led Discord to delay the launch until the second half of this year.

“Let me be upfront: we knew this rollout was going to be controversial. Any time you introduce something that touches identity and verification, people are going to have strong feelings,” Discord chief technology officer and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in a Feb. 24 blog post.

Websites offering adult content, gambling, or financial services often rely on full identity verification that requires scanning a government ID and matching it to a live image. But most of the verification systems powering these checkpoints — often run by specialized identity-verification vendors on behalf of websites — rely on artificial intelligence such as facial recognition and age-estimation models that analyze selfies or video to determine in seconds whether someone is old enough to access content. Social media and lower-risk services may use lighter estimation tools designed to confirm age without permanently storing detailed identity records.  

Vendors say a challenge is balancing safety with how much friction users will tolerate. “We’re in the business of ensuring that you are absolutely keeping minors safe and out and able to let adults in with as little friction as possible,” said Rivka Gerwitz Little, chief growth officer at identity-verification platform Socure. Excessive data collection, she added, creates friction that users resist. 
 
Still, many users perceive mandatory identity checks as invasive. “Having another way to be forced to provide that information is intrusive to people,” said Heidi Howard Tandy, a partner at Berger Singerman who specializes in intellectual property and internet law. Some users may attempt workarounds — including prepaid cards or alternative credentials — or turn to unauthorized distribution channels. “It’s going to cause a piracy situation,” she added. 

Where adult data goes 

In many implementations, verification vendors — not the websites themselves — process and retain the identity information, returning only a pass-fail signal to the platform. 

Gerwitz Little said Socure does not sell verification data and that in lightweight age-estimation scenarios, where platforms use quick facial analysis or other signals rather than government documentation, the company may store little or no information. But in fuller identity-verification contexts, such as gaming and fraud prevention that require ID scans, certain adult verification records may be retained to document compliance. She said Socure can keep some adult verification data for up to three years while following applicable privacy and purging rules.  

Civil liberties’ advocates warn that concentrating large volumes of identity data among a small number of verification vendors can create attractive targets for hackers and government demands. Earlier this year, Discord disclosed a data breach that exposed ID images belonging to approximately 70,000 users through a compromised third-party service, highlighting the security risks associated with storing sensitive identity information. 

In addition, they warn that expanding age-verification systems represent not only a usability challenge but a structural shift in how identity becomes tied to online behavior. Age verification risks tying users’ “most sensitive and immutable data” — names, faces, birthdays, home addresses — to their online activity, according to Molly Buckley, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  “Age verification strikes at the foundation of the free and open internet,” she said.

Even when vendors promise to safeguard personal information, users ultimately rely on contractual terms they rarely read or fully understand. “There’s language in their terms-of-use policies that says if the information is requested by law enforcement, they’ll hand it over. They can’t confirm that they will always forever be the only entity who has all of this information. Everyone needs to understand that their baseline information is not something under their control,” Tandy said. 

As more platforms route age checks through third-party vendors, that concentration of identity data is also creating new legal exposure for the companies that rely on them. “A company is going to have some of that information passing through their own servers,” Tandy said. “And you can’t offload that kind of liability to a third party.” 

Companies can distribute risk through contracts and insurance, she said, but they remain responsible for how identity systems interact with their infrastructure. “What you can do is have really good insurance and require really good insurance from the entities that you’re contracting with,” she said. 

Tandy also cautioned that retention promises can be more complex than they appear. “If they say they’re holding it for three years, that’s the minimum amount of time they’re holding it for,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable trusting a company that says, ‘We delete everything one day after three years.’ That is not going to happen,” she added. 

Legal battles are not over

Federal and state regulators argue that age-verification laws are primarily a response to documented harms to minors and insist the rules must operate under strict privacy and security safeguards. 

An FTC spokesperson told CNBC that companies must limit how collected information is used. While age-verification technologies can help parents protect children online, the agency said firms are still bound by existing consumer protection rules governing data minimization, retention, and security. The agency pointed to existing rules requiring firms to retain personal information only as long as reasonably necessary and to safeguard its confidentiality and integrity. 

CNBC