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| Instagram wants to check your age by scanning your face |
Instagram is testing new ways to verify users' ages, including an artificial intelligence tool developed by third-party company Yoti that estimates your age simply by scanning your face.
Officially, you must be at least 13 years old to create an Instagram account. But the company has made little effort to enforce the rule for years.
Until 2019, new users were not asked for their date of birth, let alone trying to verify this information.
After the opposition of privacy and child safety experts, Instagram introduced more age verification features and ways to distinguish young users from adults.
The platform currently requires users to verify their ages when teens attempt to change their birth dates to indicate they are 18.
To check their ages, users can submit photos from different IDs. It also now offers Social Security and AI estimation options for users in the United States.
For social security, the platform requires three regular subscribers from the user to confirm their ages. Subscribers must be at least 18 years old and have three days to respond to platform requests.
While the AI estimation method consists of sending personalized videos to Yoti, machine learning is used to estimate a person's age.
Yoti is a well known age and online authentication company. Its technology has been approved by the UK government and German digital regulator. Various facial features are used to estimate the age of the target.
Instagram is currently testing an AI tool
You can try the Yoti system online. The company says it does not store any data you share with it. The company provides a table of accuracy rates.
Figures in years show the margin of error in Ute's age estimates for different age groups, race, and gender.
The data showed that the Ute system was less accurate for the faces of women and people with darker skin. For those younger than 24, it can also be estimated as less than 2.5 years.
However, when the tool made general guesses about a user's age, its accuracy improved. A 2020 review of Yoti by a third-party non-profit found it to be 98.89% accurate when it comes to guessing whether an 18 is older or younger than 25.
It's unclear how these numbers translate to Instagram use cases or whether the system is secure enough.
State that this is not the only tool that Instagram uses to estimate the age of its users. Since 2019, the company has been using an automated system to search for minors.
These tools look at information such as a user's birthday messages and the age of groups of friends. So if a user claims to be 20 but there are posts about celebrating their 17th birthday, their account will be flagged and their age may need to be verified.
Instagram said it is adding new data points to the system. He also tested a speech analysis tool that uses what he wrote to determine if the user is an adult or a teenager.