In recent months, Instagram has incorporated several new functions designed to protect children and adolescents who use the social network. And in recent days it announced that it will require users to indicate their date of birth , as a new measure aimed at child protection.
The Facebook-owned platform announced the decision through its official blog (via Reuters). According to Instagram, this new determination aims to “create safer and more private experiences” for the youngest .
“To do this, we need to know how old everyone is on Instagram, so we started asking people to share their date of birth with us if they haven't previously. This information allows us to create new safety features for young people, and helps to ensure that we provide the appropriate experiences to the appropriate age group, “they stated from the social network.
On the other hand, from Instagram they indicated that they need to know the date of birth of each user to apply the most recent changes in their advertising policy; specifically, to restrict ad targeting options to those under 18 years of age .
Instagram wants to know your date of birth, or will not allow you access your account
If when creating your Instagram account you did not establish when you were born, you will begin to see different types of notices in the main feed that will invite you to complete this information. Even this data will be requested to enable certain publications that may be considered sensitive.
The social network app will show these plates repeatedly until, reaching a certain point, it will be impossible to continue ignoring them. Specifically, the platform will not allow you to access your account until you indicate the corresponding date . If you choose not to do so, the only available alternative will be to log out.
The Instagram ad is interesting, although it generates a logical question: How can you know if the date of birth that we report is real? The short answer is that at the moment they have no practical way of verifying it. In fact, from the social network they recognize that lying with this information is one of the most common traps, and it is not really new.
However, they also indicated that they are developing a system to detect when someone misrepresents their age. Facebook works on a tool based on artificial intelligence that will identify if a user is less than what they have declared . To do this, it will analyze information obtained in comments on specific publications, such as birthday wishes. In the future, when Instagram finds anomalies of this type, a menu of options will be displayed for the users in question to verify how old they are.
For now, if you want to add your date of birth, you can do so from the Instagram settings, in the Personal Information section. If your profile is linked to your Facebook account, the application will automatically collect said information , which can also be updated.
