In recent times, the Instagram App has been working to offer users new tools for age verification. And among these there seems to be an Artificial Intelligence able to verify a person’s actual age directly from a selfie video. A system that is part of the broader platform strategy to ensure that users are at least 13 years old. And “to make sure teens and adults have the right experience for their age group”. But let’s find out something more.
Instagram: App will use AI for age verification of users
As announced by the Instagram app, users will have two different new possibilities for age verification. First of all, the “social vouching” option, which allows users to ask three common followers to confirm their age. But under some conditions: “the person who guarantees must be at least 18 years old, must not guarantee for anyone else at that time and must satisfy the other guarantees we have in place”, reads the platform’s blog. In addition, the three chosen people will receive a request to confirm the user’s age, and will have to respond within three days of his arrival.
The second option, as already mentioned, is to upload a selfie video to verify the user’s age. Once uploaded, this will be shared with a company named Yoti. “Yoti’s technology estimates your age based on your facial features and shares that estimate with us. Meta and Yoti then delete the image. Technology cannot recognize your identity, only your age “. Yet, despite these reassurances, users are very wary of Meta and Instagram’s data management. Not to mention that Yoti’s technology has shown a high error rate depending on gender, age group and skin color.
Yoti’s system is already used by the British and German governments to detect age using Deep Learning, after having been trained on “hundreds of thousands” of images. Like other neural networks, however, it is not quite so easy to understand how they work, so it is not clear to us what details of the physiognomy are used to verify the age of a person. Either way, it would appear that the system works quite well, proving less accurate for dark-skinned female faces, and more accurate with light-skinned male faces.
Beyond that, the goal of the Instagram App is to “prevent teens from accessing Facebook Dating, adults from texting teens, and help teens receive limited advertising content, for example”. But this appears to be just the beginning, as the company said it plans to expand its use “largely through our technologies”.