Ethical consequences of publishing youth-athlete statistics

Determine whether and under what safeguards reliable per-player statistics about youth athletes can be published or deployed without causing harms such as recruitment screening, premature specialization pressure, or inappropriate comparisons among children.

Background

The corpus contains footage of minors and young adults participating in school and club sports. The authors identify a downstream risk distinct from privacy: statistical records about individual youth athletes could be used in ways the athletes and their families did not anticipate when the footage was recorded.

The paper does not resolve whether these uses are acceptable or what governance safeguards would adequately address them. It explicitly characterizes the issue as an open question for the field.

References

We considered, and are explicit about, a downstream risk this line of work carries that is distinct from privacy: publishing reliable per-player statistics about youth athletes could plausibly be put to uses (recruitment screening, premature specialisation pressure, or comparison across children at an age where statistical performance is a poor predictor of anything durable) that the athletes and families whose footage informed this study did not anticipate when the footage was recorded, and we regard this as a genuine open question for the field rather than one this paper resolves.

— Prompt, Probe, Train, or Annotate? Single-camera sports video understanding in amateur settings  (2609.28049 - Kodathala et al., 23 Sep 2026) in Statements, Ethics paragraph