Instagram Is Now Asking Everyone For Their Birthdays

If you open up Instagram and you see a prompt asking you about your birthday, it’s not that Instagram wants to wish you a happy birthday, it’s because the company is trying to determine everyone’s age so that they can make their platform a safer place for their younger users.

According to Instagram, “This information allows us to create new safety features for young people, and helps ensure we provide the right experiences to the right age group. Recent examples include changes we made in March to prevent adults from sending messages to people under 18 who don’t follow them, and last month we started to default new accounts belonging to people under the age of 16 into a private setting.”

Instagram also says that by determining your age, they know which type of advertiser content to restrict. You might think, what if I just fake my birthday? While you could, Instagram advises against that. The company says they have systems in place that can determine if your age is fake.

“We recognize some people may give us the wrong birthday, and we’re developing new systems to address this. As we shared recently, we’re using artificial intelligence to estimate how old people are based on things like “Happy Birthday” posts. In the future, if someone tells us they’re above a certain age, and our technology tells us otherwise, we’ll show them a menu of options to verify their age.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Instagram, Privacy