Technology

as someone from the 80's I'm offended somehow.

Nothing can fix things because teenagers will not cooperate. If Instagram could identify all its teenage users, those users would move to a platform that couldn't. The only thing the restrictions achieve is a reduction in the market share of the platform with the restrictions.

I still always say I was born in the 80s out of habit...

I always say 1900 out of habit.... I was at least once rejected as too old :D

Nothing beats 1970-01-01.

If you're 25 now, you were 15 during the early wild west days of smartphone adoption, while we as a society were just figuring that stuff out.

Since that time, the major tech companies that control a big chunk of our digital identities have made pretty big moves at recording family relationships between accounts. I'm a parent in a mixed Android/iOS family, and it's pretty clear that Apple and Google have it figured out pretty well: child accounts linked to dates of birth that automatically change permissions and parental controls over time, based on age (including severing the parental controls when they turn 18). Some of it is obvious, like billing controls (nobody wants their teen running up hundreds of dollars in microtransactions), app controls, screen time/app time monitoring, location sharing, password resets, etc. Some of it is convenience factor, like shared media accounts/subscriptions by household (different Apple TV+ profiles but all on the same paid subscription), etc.

I haven't made child accounts for my kids on Meta. But I probably will whenever they're old enough to use chat (and they'll want WhatsApp accounts). Still, looking over the parent/child settings on Facebook accounts, it'll probably be pretty straightforward to create accounts for them, link a parent/child relationship, and then have another dashboard to manage as a parent. Especially if something like Oculus takes off and that's yet another account to deal with paid apps or subscriptions.

There might even be network effects, where people who have child accounts are limited in the adult accounts they can interact with, and the social circle's equilibrium naturally tends towards all child accounts (or the opposite, where everyone gets themselves an adult account).

The fact is, many of the digital natives of Gen Alpha aren't actually going to be as tech savvy as their parents as they dip their toes into the world of the internet. Because they won't need to figure stuff out on their own to the same degree.

HI JUST JOSHIN I'M WOGI

Seriously what is this crap

I think it's an AI summary (if you read just the highlighted part)

I'm 100% in the second camp. Facebook having my ID is a much bigger issue than having my kids' profile be public. I as a parent can ensure my kids' profiles are acceptable, or mark them as private myself. I can't ensure Facebook deletes my ID after verifying my identity.

Yes, kids should be safer online, and that starts at home. Educate parents and kids about how to stay safe, that's as far as it should go.

Anything to prevent getting my i.d in a database, i would actually be ok with using an ai to verify my age by my appearance if it really came down to it and I had to choose legally some form of age verification.

Yeah, I'm not sure. People are calling it highlighting, but it doesn't fit any reasonable pattern to have been manually highlighted. Is there some sort of bad automated highlighting? Or just someone still learning what highlighting is even used for. Or is it just some sort of style thing?

They have an account their parents can see and private accounts

the weirder thing is teens using their real identity online at all.

Not really, teenagers naturally want to socialize. It's pretty normal. Is it the best thing? no.

They are not. They just make it look like they care, but nothing actually changes

Meta said it was fully expecting many teenagers would try to evade the new measures.

"The more restrictive the experience is, the stronger the theoretical incentive for a teen to try and work around the restriction," Mr Mosseri said.

In response, the company is launching and developing new tools to catch them out.

Instagram already asks for proof of age from teenage users trying to change their listed date of birth to an adult one, and has done since 2022.

Now, as a new measure, if an underage user tries to set up a new Instagram account with an adult date of birth on the same device, the platform will notice and force them to verify their age.

In a statement, the company said it was not sharing all the tools it was using, "because we don't want to give teens an instruction manual".

"So we are working on all these tools, some of them already exist … we need to improve [them] and figure out how to provide protections for those we think are lying about their age," Mr Mosseri said.

The most stubborn category of "age-liars" are underage users who lied about their age at the outset.

But Meta said it was developing AI tools to proactively detect those people by analysing user behaviour, networks and the way they interact with content.

Source.

Trying to avoid regulations of course.