From The Verge: Instagram is testing new methods for users to verify their age, including an AI tool built by a third-party company, Yoti, that estimates how old you are just by scanning your face.
Officially, you have to be at least 13 years old to sign up for an Instagram account, but for years the company made little effort to enforce this rule. Until 2019, it didn’t even bother to ask new users their birthdate, let alone try to verify this information. After being raked over the coals by privacy and child safety experts, though, Instagram has introduced more and more age-verification features, as well as methods to separate younger users from adults.
Currently, Instagram asks users to verify their age only when teenagers try to edit their birth date to show them as 18 or older. To verify their age, users can send in pictures of various ID cards, and, from today, users in the US will have two additional options: social vouching and AI estimation.
For the first method, social vouching, Instagram will ask three mutual followers of the user to confirm how old they are. The mutual followers will have to be over the age of 18 themselves, and will have three days to respond to Instagram’s request. The second method, AI estimation, involves sending a video selfie to a third-party company, Yoti, which uses machine learning to estimate a person’s age.
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