Photo courtesy of Little Media Agency and Today's Parent
Instagram has once again enforced a new method to verify users' age. However, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and face scanning this time, and it's something it has never done before.
It has been a long while since Instagram made an effort to stop users below 13 years old from signing up for an account. However, pressured by privacy and child safety experts, the platform has recently introduced more and more age-verification features.
This new one will only ask users to verify their age if they're teenagers trying to edit their birth date to show them as 18 or older. They can do so by uploading pictures of various ID cards or, for US users, fulfilling social vouching and AI estimation. Social vouching works by letting other three users, who are 18 and above, prove that they're how old they say. The users only have three days to respond to Instagram's request. Meanwhile, the AI estimation involves sending a video selfie to a third-party company, Yoti, which uses machine learning to estimate a person's age.
Yoti has been a reputable company in the online age and ID verification segment. It's even trusted by the UK government and German digital regulators. If you want to know how it works, it says that it uses various facial signals to estimate a target's age. Its technology was 98.89 per cent accurate at guessing whether or not people aged 18 were over or under 25, which means for every 1,000 guesses the system made, only between 0 and 11 would be mistaken.
Do you think this new verification method can help prevent young users from signing up for an account? Leave a comment to let us know your opinion, and stay tuned to TechNave.com for more tech reports.
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