Why does Instagram need to know your birthday
Instagram wants know everyone’s date of birth and each of the users who make use of its social platform. A large part of them already know it, because now it is a piece of information that must be entered when creating a new account, but not for others and that is why it is showing them a pop-up window to enter it. If they don’t, that pop up will reappear and even threaten that if the data is not provided, you will not be able to continue using the app.
Why are they doing this? Well, from Instagram they have been very clear: the idea is help improve and protect the experience of using the minors. So, for example, knowing this information could prevent adults from sending private messages to minors, remembering that the legal minimum age to have an Instagram profile is 13 years old.
And that must be admitted that it is a good thing. Because although, between the ages of 13 and 18, it really should be the father, mother or guardian who creates and supervises the account, many minors create it on their own and lie in these data that allow establishing certain protection measures. In addition, the age data will not be public, so other users will not know it unless you want to publish a message on the platform so that everyone can see it.
Instagram will guess your real age
You may think that knowing the age of each Instagram user is an ineffective measure for the protection of minors. Because if something has become clear to us about the use of the Internet, it is that you can easily lie.
When registering for 99.9% of online services and applications you can lie with your name, phone number, address, date of birth, etc. Only in some do you have to resort to official verification methods to be able to have an account, but social networks such as Instagram are not one of these places.
However, for all those liars, Instagram has a solution that is just starting to work and in the near future it will be quite well trained and its effectiveness will improve: an AI capable of guessing what your birthday is real. How would you do this? Well, very easy.
It is likely that at some point you have heard expressions such as “lies have very short legs” or “to lie you have to have a good memory.” Well, by using an AI, the social network will be able to guess and estimate the age of its users in a much more precise way. Because you will only have to be attentive to publications such as “Happy Birthday” that are usually made unconsciously.
Logically it will not be something simple or 100% accurate for everyone, but in those profiles that use the platform more intensively and that interacting with more users it will be easy to detect whether or not they have lied with that data. So, if Instagram notifies you that it wants to know your birthday, tell it the exact date. First, because they will not show it publicly and second because, even if you can do whatever you want, it is very easy for you to end up knowing what the day you were born really is.
