Instagram is testing a new way to verify users’ ages, using an artificial intelligence tool developed by Yoti, which estimates age by simply scanning a user’s face in photos.
Instagram requires that the user be at least 13 years old, to register and obtain an account normally, but this condition can be bypassed and easily circumvented by entering an incorrect age.
A report by The Verge indicated that the popular photo and video sharing application is introducing more and more new features, after it was attacked and criticized about the risks posed to children and teens because of what they see as content inappropriate for their age.
It is noteworthy here that the Instagram application also launched this month the Parental Control feature, in an attempt to protect teens. More details here.
The report indicated that the application will start verifying the ages of users through their photos using the technology of image analysis using artificial intelligence, to put an end to the attempt of teenagers to modify their date of birth to show that they are 18 years old or older.
Starting today, teens in the US will have two additional options to verify their age, social sponsorship or an AI estimate through image analysis.
For the first method, Social Security, Instagram will ask the user’s three joint followers to confirm their age, and the joint followers must be over 18, and they will have three days to respond to the request.
As for the second method, artificial intelligence estimation, it involves sending a selfie to Yoti, which uses advanced technology to estimate a person’s age after analyzing their profile picture.
Yoti is well known in the field of online age and identity verification, its technology has been approved for use by the UK government and German digital regulators, and the company makes sure it doesn’t keep any data that is shared with it.
It is worth noting that the Instagram integration feature of Yoti’s AI age estimation tool is not the only AI-supported tool that the social platform uses to try to estimate the ages of users as well. Since 2019, the company has been using automated systems to search for underage users, such as examining holiday posts. Users’ birthdays and ages of their Friendship Groups.
