Instagram will require users to provide their birthday – ProWellTech

Instagram will prompt users to share their birthday with the service if they haven’t already. The company announced today that it will now display a notification asking you to add your birthday to “personalize your experience”. However, the request can only be rejected a few times before it becomes a request. The move is part of Instagram’s larger goal of creating new security features for younger users, the company explains. These include the teen privacy policy launched earlier this year, as well as Instagram’s longer-term plan to bring a version of its service to users under the age of 13.

In March of this year, Instagram introduced new features that make it difficult for adults to contact teenagers through its app. Then in July, the company announced a major series of changes to the default settings for new users under the age of 16. It will now set the accounts of these users to “private” by default and prevent their accounts from being suggested elsewhere in the app. It now also restricts adults whose accounts are flagged as “potentially suspicious” from reaching out to other minors or interacting with their posts.

Starting this week, users who have not yet shared their birthday will see pop-up notifications when they open the Instagram app, according to Instagram.

These notifications will show up a few times, but at some point users won’t be able to close the message by tapping Not Now. Instead, everyone will ultimately have to share their birthday in order to continue using Instagram.

The company will now also ask you to share your birthday information if you come across a post with a warning screen. These screens, which hide content marked as sensitive or graphical, are not new. But Instagram has never asked about a user’s birthday before showing the hidden content.

Credit: Instagram

The birthday entry form itself is not complex. Just scroll to select the month, day and year of your birthday.

Of course, it is common knowledge that children lie on these sign-up forms in order to bypass any restrictions on signing up for apps. On that front has Instagram developed AI technology to identify accounts that children may have lied about. For example, it may be possible to infer a person’s birthday based on comments on “Happy Birthday” posts that can indicate the age of the user. The company also points out further plans in this area, advising that users will need to check their ages later if Facebook’s technology detects a discrepancy between the age reported by the user and what appears to be their actual age based on other signals.

This technology is still in its “early stages”, Instagram says, but will include a menu of options for someone to check their age.

The need to have users’ birthdays on hand isn’t just meant to back up recently introduced protections for teenagers. Instagram is also working to bring its app to younger users – a decision that has met with hostile reactions Legislator and consumer associations alike. Additionally, age remains an important data point for ad targeting. Even though Instagram limited the ability for marketers to target teens using interest data or their activity in other apps, it will continue to enable ad targeting based on age, gender, and location across all age groups.

The company is now one of several to put in place extra protections for younger teenage users before there are regulations that would force them to do so. Later this year, TikTok, YouTube, and Google also announced changes to how younger teenagers use their services and how they can be targeted with ads in anticipation of regulatory crackdown. While everyone has developed their own security features for teenagers, the changes largely focused on making the default settings more restrictive for new teenage users.

According to Instagram, the new birthday pop-up notifications will appear on the mobile app this week and will continue to be rolled out in the coming weeks to reach more users.