The Instagram social network will ask all its users to provide their date of birth in the coming weeks to offer their latest security features for minors, something that will be forced compliance for those who want to continue enjoying the application.
The platform began to ask for the date of birth to its users years ago.
However, facilitating this information was, until now, of a voluntary nature and users could refuse to facilitate their date of birth.
In order to implement the obligation to facilitate your date of birth to Instagram, the social network owned by Facebook has carried out a two-band strategy.
First, Instago will start by asking the date of birth when users open the application via notification that will be displayed on the screen.
It will be necessary to share this information to continue using the platform.
Second, if the user sees warning screens located in publications with sensitive or explicit content, the social network will ask you for your date of birth before you can see the content.
Instagram already shows these screens but until now it did not ask for age in them.
The social network justifies the need for users to provide them with their date of birth to “create safer and safer experiences for young people” through recently introduced young people protection functions, such as the one that prevents adults from sending lessons to minors.
Do not follow them, or private accounts by default for children under 16 years of age.
This information also allows you to customize the experience and apply to more people the recent changes it has made to restrict the orientation options of advertisers to children under 18 years of age.
Likewise, to detect cases in which users provide an erroneous birth date, Instagram is developing artificial intelligence systems to detect publications with congratulations as ‘Happy Birthday’, in order to find out your real age.
In the future, if someone says it is greater than a certain age, and technology says otherwise, Instagram will show you a menu of options to verify your age.
This work is still in its first phases.
