Instagram has new policies on its platform and they go through asking users what their birthday is . How could it be otherwise, there is a good explanation behind, which has shared the firm itself in its latest official publication. We tell you everything.
Birthday date request on Instagram
All those who create an Instagram account from now on will have to answer a question that has never been raised, the birthday date. During all these years, Instagram has never requested this data from users, however, as of today this changes.
What is the reason and why is such a trivial a priori data so important? Because of the implication that comes with your response. As the company explains in an official note issued today, this request seeks to create “age-appropriate experiences , ” so that depending on when a user was born, they may receive information or other information related to recommended privacy settings, by example.
Instagram points out that birthday dates will be hidden at all times and that, at least for now, those who are already users of the content social network will not be asked for this data – although we would not be surprised if the latter changes sooner rather than later to update the entire database.
As indicated in The Verge , until now only the date was asked when a user connected their Facebook account with Instagram – in the case of minors – to open an account on the platform you must be at least 13 years old – in The European Union is a requirement for data protection issues of GDPR.
What Instagram will not have will be some method of verification of that age, so it leaves it to the user that is 100% sincere, although it ensures that they have employees and machine learning systems capable of estimating ages (and gender) through filtering of published photos in which for example there are comments of the type “happy birthday”.
They are not the only changes that the postureo network introduces par excellence . Likewise, Instagram will now allow directly blocking the reception of messages from people you don’t follow . Also, according to Reuters, content creators with professional accounts will be enabled to prohibit access to minors to their accounts , if they believe they are not suitable for certain ages.
Everything, as you can see, is very focused on the protection of the child and on better controlling the access it has to the contents on the internet. YouTube in the past has been, for example, a source of controversy for this reason, so it does not hurt that Instagram takes action on the matter in time to help better manage the access of the youngest to what content of their social network -or that other people can contact them without knowing them, with the aforementioned blocking of messages.
Good for Instagram.
