World’s one of the most popular social media platforms, Instagram, reveals its plans to use artificial intelligence and other tools to verify the age of its users.
It has been a concern for several years as innumerable individuals below the required age get to use social media platforms without facing much trouble.
The root cause behind this issue is that no particular method can be implemented to accurately identify someone’s actual age.
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To tackle this challenge, Instagram is now testing various ways to verify the age of its users, such as a face-scanning artificial intelligence technology, having common friends verify their age, or submitting an ID.
To use the facial scanning option, a user has to upload a video selfie, which will then be sent to Yoti, a UK-based company, for age verification.
However, this technology has also faced backlashes from people as Facebook’s image related to privacy has not been pretty good. The concern is that the privacy of the IDs and images uploaded by teenagers has to be in safe hands.
Nevertheless, according to the company, privacy is not at all a matter to worry about, as the technology used to check people’s ages does not recognize identity but merely age.
Julie Dawson, Yoti’s chief policy and regulatory officer, said, “It doesn’t ever recognize, uniquely, anyone. And the image is instantly deleted once we’ve done it.”
Meta stated that starting on Thursday, anyone attempting to change their Instagram date of birth from under the age of 18 to 18 or over would be forced to authenticate their age using one of these ways. “We are giving people a variety of options to verify their age and seeing what works best,” said Erica Finkle, Meta’s director of data governance and public policy.
