That Instagram has a complicated relationship with minors It is a fact more than accredited over time and, very especially, during the last year and a half. Although this service has now been displaced by TikTok as the favorite for this audience, minors who use Instagram on a daily basis are still legion, something that the social network tries to encourage and maintain by taking measures so that parents trust the platform enough. social network to allow their children to use it.
The problem is that, even taking those measures, Instagram accumulates a rather questionable history. In April of last year, it became known about his plans to create an Instagram for children, which is questionable in itself (and in fact was so questioned that Meta was forced to pause the project), and that it only got worse when Shortly after, the results of some studies carried out by the company were leaked and they came to demonstrate, beyond all reasonable doubt, the terrible influence of Instagram on the mental health of the youngest.
However, although Instagram’s problem with minors became especially public and notorious in 2021, in reality it has been dragging problems in this regard for longer, and one of them will reach a decisive point very soon. And it is that, as we can read in TechCrunch, the The European Union will rule in the coming weeks on an investigation started in September 2020, about the use that Instagram makes of the data of minors.
As the media has been able to find out, this pronouncement is expected between the last week of August or, at the latest, the first week of Septemberalthough the meaning of it is unknown, that is, if the European organizations will have determined that Instagram must make changes in its operation to adapt to the protection that the GDPR determines for the smallest, as well as if a fine will be raised for the way in which it has operated so far.
The investigation was initiated by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC)the main data supervisor of Meta in the European Union, but from that body it made the leap to the European Committee for Data Protection, the body responsible for guaranteeing the consistent application of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
The deputy commissioner of the CPD, Graham Doyle, confirmed that the decision corresponds to the European regulator by the conflict resolution process of article 65 of the GDPR:
«Last week we received the response from the European Committee for Data Protection. […] We will have a decision… at the end of the last week of August or the first week of September. It has to be finished by the first week of September«.
The investigation, based on a complaint, determined that Instagram would have allowed minors to create professional profileswhich in turn would have meant that the companies could have accessed their data, despite the fact that this is prohibited by the GDPR.
The regulatory body has confirmed today that the scope of its investigation covers the issue of the treatment of children’s data for professional Instagram accounts; and also a second element that has to do with a user registration system that the platform managed, which, as it has discovered, could lead to the accounts of underage users being configured as “public” by default, unless the user changed the account settings to set it to “private”.
