Instagram wants you to tell it when your birthday is . So he’s going to insist a lot on you in case he doesn’t know when it is yet. And it does not matter if you have thought about lying to him, because he even has a system that will help him find out. But why so much insistence on knowing when was the day you were born. Well, this time the reason is largely justified. We’ll tell you then.
Why does Instagram need to know your birthday
Instagram wants to know the date of birth of each and every one of the users who use 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 to help improve and protect the user experience of minors . So, for example, knowing this information could prevent adults from sending messages privately to minors, remembering that the minimum legal age to have a profile on Instagram 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 them unless you want to by publishing 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 beginning to work and in the near future will be quite well trained and its effectiveness will improve: an AI capable of guessing what your real birthday is. 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 of the “Happy Birthday” type 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.
