Instagram has announced that its popular app has begun experimenting with a new way to verify the ages of users in the United States.
According to a report by “Business Insider”, the experiment focuses on users who try to change their age on the application to 18 years and above. These users have 3 ways to verify their age: upload a photo of their ID, ask 3 mutual friends to verify their age, or record a “selfie” video.
If the user chooses the “selfie” video method, Instagram passes the videos to Yoti in London for identity verification. Instagram said it would scan a user’s facial features in videos to confirm their age.
Both Instagram and YouTube will delete the data once the user’s age is verified, according to the report.
Instagram wrote – citing a white paper from Ute – that the London startup’s algorithm only verifies the user’s age and not his identity. He said the process would allow him to provide age-appropriate content to his users.
“Knowing someone’s age online is a complex industry-wide challenge,” the app wrote in the blog post. “We want to work with others in our industry, and with governments, to establish clear criteria to verify this.”
He said that if a user chooses to send a photo of their ID to confirm their age to Instagram, the photo will be deleted after 30 days.
Instagram has come under fire from parents and critics who say it exposes minors to harmful content, so in 2019 Instagram began checking users’ ages to prevent people under 13 from creating accounts.
In August, Instagram began asking existing users to provide their dates of birth. Last September, Facebook stopped launching Instagram Kids, a version of the app it was designing for children under the age of 13.
Other social media companies are also scanning users’ faces to prevent minors from using their platforms.
French social networking site Yubo said in May that it had partnered with start-up Yote to take pictures of users’ faces to identify minors.
And the Chinese company “Tencent” said last January that it would study the faces of users when logging in in order to limit children’s playing time on its platform.
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