Instagram requires users to reveal their birthdays, a move the company claims to protect young people who use the app. The company said it would begin sending out notifications asking for your birthday to “personalize your experience. However, you can only dismiss the prompt a few times before it becomes mandatory.
Since 2019, the picture app has required new users to provide their birthday when they sign up. People who had previously signed up, on the other hand, may not have given their information. And the change is part of the company’s larger mission to develop additional safety features aimed at younger users. This involves the teen privacy measures introduced earlier this year and Instagram’s longer-term goal to establish a version of its service focused on children under 13.
Instagram introduced new features in March this year that made it more difficult for adults to communicate with teenagers using the service. The company then introduced a broader set of changes to the default settings for new users under 16 in July. These users’ accounts will now be set to “private,” preventing them from being suggested elsewhere in the app. Adults whose accounts have been identified as “possibly suspect” can no longer contact other kids or interact with their posts.
According to Instagram, user’s who haven’t shared their birthday yet will see pop-up messages when they open the Instagram app in the next couple of weeks. These notifications will show a few times, but users will no longer ignore them by tapping “Not Now” after a certain number of times.
Instead, everyone will be obliged to share their birthday to continue to use Instagram in the future. When you come across a post with a warning message, the company will ask for your birthdate information.
The company also said it would use Artificial intelligence to determine whether a user has submitted a false birthday, and some users may be requested to “verify” their age. In the future, if someone claims to be over a specific age, but our technology proves otherwise, we’ll present them with a menu of options to verify their age. This effort is still in its early phases, and we hope to share more information soon.
The changes are the most recent in a series of attempts by Instagram to improve security and privacy features for its youngest users. The business has also announced that it will make accounts for younger teens private by default and limit advertisers’ targeting of the population. It also recently added measures to prevent adult strangers from sending messages to teenagers. Instagram has also stated that it is considering a version of its service for users under 13.
