Instagram is owned by Meta an American multinational company, that also owns Facebook, Messenger, Giphy, and Oculus, whereas Instagram is a free photo and video sharing app available on iPhone and Android. People are connected with there family and friends, there is a option to follow each other, like, comment, and share the posts, it has hundreds of millions of daily active users.

India has many active users on social networking platforms, Instagram has brought its latest feature on age verification to prevent kids from creating fake profiles, amid growing worries that kids are using fake date of birth to create a social media account, considering this Instagram has brought its new test for verifying age via an original ID or video selfie. The company will now require to verify age, when someone attempts to edit their date of birth i.e. under the age of 18.

Company said “We are testing this so we can make sure teens and adults are in the right experience for their age group. Testing began in june this year in the US, and now it’s expanding to India and Brazilwhereas, the company is planning to expand its test to the UK and the EU before the end of the year. “We are also removing Social Vouching as an option to verify age from the test to make some improvements,” Instagram added.

The Social Vouching feature allows the users to ask their followers to confirm their age. The person vouching for another user must be at least 18 years old and not be vouching for anyone else at that time. Instagram is endeavouring to make the platform a safer space to all users amid higher rate of risks for kids the is assuring to maintain an equilibrium amongst all its users and also to prevent from any unwanted social hacking.

FEATURES OF AGE VERIFICATION

  • If someone edits date of birth on Instagram from under the age of 18 to 18, or over, in India, the company will now require to verify their original age using two options: upload their ID or record a Video Selfie.
  • After selecting this option, you will find more instructions on your screen to guide you, for adding an ID or recording a Video.
  • According to Instagram, after the person takes a video selfie, the image will be shared with Yoti, a technology to estimate age based facial features. Yoti is a company that offers privacy-preserving ways to verify age.
  • Meta and Yoti then delete the image, they are not going to save private information anywhere, the technology cannot recognize user’s identity but just the age.

Featured image credit

Red Newswire