For safety or ads? Instagram will be asking for your date of birth
If you don’t do it, you won’t be able to utilize the service of the social media platform
NEW DELHI — Instagram is proposing a policy change that will require users to give the platform their date of birth.
You won’t be able to utilize the service if you don’t reveal your birthdate despite numerous reminders, as per TheNextWeb.
This functionality, according to the company, will help it increase user safety and enable the platform to add more tools to that objective.
Child, teen safety a priority for Instagram
Instagram has developed a number of measures linked to teen safety in recent months. It launched an AI-powered tool in March to restrict adults from texting children. It made all new accounts under the age of 16 private by default last month.
If you didn’t enter your birthday when you first signed up, the application will send you several notifications about it, such as the one below.
The business also intends to limit some types of information to certain age groups. Before viewing potentially sensitive information, it will ask you to disclose your birthday if you haven’t already done so.
Age data to help Instagram serve relevant ads
This new modification, however, has a peculiarity. Instagram didn’t hide the fact that this will allow it to display “you more relevant ads.”
We understand that as a social networking site, it needs to have age restrictions as a function, but utilizing that data for advertising is a sarcastic move. But we’re talking about a Facebook-owned company, after all.
Instagram’s enhanced search feature might help it catch up to TikTok
Days before on August 25, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced that in the future, pictures and videos would be shown more prominently in search results.
Similar to how TikTok shows results, the change may offer a grid of images and videos that a keyword search can bring up alongside results for accounts and hashtags.
According to Mosseri, the search adjustment is part of a series of upgrades aimed for inspiration and discovery.
The company has already utilized keyword search to provide visual results — some phrases may bring up pages of suggested photos — but Instagram’s new strategy will prioritize those.
