Instagram to force users to share their birthdays; calls to tighten UK porn laws
Instagram has started asking users for their date of birth as part of efforts to introduce tighter safety features for its younger visitors.
The firm said the information would allow them to restrict accounts of older users from messaging those under the age of 18 and change the advertising experience to restrict targeting options for those users too.
Instagram plans to give users a window of opportunity to share their birthday with the platform before they restrict access to it altogether.
Warning screens will also be placed on adult content that prompts users to enter their birthday as a way to restrict inappropriate content from younger users.
“We recognise some people may give us the wrong birthday, and we’re developing new systems to address this,” Instagram said in a blog post.
“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. This work is still in the early stages, and we look forward to sharing more soon.”
The changes will only affect Instagram users who have not previously shared their birthday on the app.
Meanwhile, the Children’s Commissioner for England has warned that age verification processes could be mandated for porn sites in the UK if they fail to do more to stop young people from accessing them.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Dame Rachel de Souza called for “stronger protections” to be imposed to keep children safe online.
She has suggested three alternative measures to the Government including reinstating the proposed 2017 law on age verification for porn sites and instructing Ofcom to produce a code of practice for the social media firms.
“We’ve got to put stronger protections in place,” de Souza told the Telegraph.
“Despite all the best efforts of the tech companies trying to clean sites up, it just clearly isn’t as effective as it needs to be.
“These tech companies are so huge. They are such strong businesses, I really want to push back on them and say ‘Although you are doing many things, the volume of traffic is so huge, you need to do more to keep kids safe’.”
Earlier this month, over 90 policy and rights groups around the world published an open letter urging Apple to abandon plans for scanning children’s messages for nudity and the phones of adults for images of child sex abuse.
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