Gone are the days where you can lie about your date of birth.
Meta is using AI technology to search for kids who are lying about their age on Instagram in order to bypass safeguards, the company announced on Monday. When Meta finds an account that it suspects belongs to a teen, the platform will enroll them into a restricted Teen Account, even if the account lists an adult birthday.
Teen Accounts, which launched on Instagram last year, enroll young users into an app experience with built-in protections. The safeguards are applied to teens automatically, and limit who can contact a teen on the app and restrict the type of content the account holder can view. Teens under the age of 16 need their parents’ permission to change any of these settings.
Instagram has been using AI to determine age for quite some time, but now the social network confirms it’s using the technology to ensure that teens are accessing Instagram via a Teen Account rather than an adult one.
And this is only what’s being reported publicly. Their machine learning can pickup on way more things than just this. Creating alt accounts is useless with meta products unless you change everything about how you operate.
Although I would take this over ID verification any day, I simply do not believe that AI based age estimation works reliably, so they will either be overly cautious or underly cautious, one of which is unfair to the user and the other of which is completely useless.
If governments wants to protect children online (which I do agree with), then they should provide a more private and secure method. With login.gov in the US, they could build a system that allows you to login with that and it only sends over your age to Meta. Of course, this will never happen, but one can dream…