At the beginning of next year, Meta will start testing its new AI solution, with which it wants to catch young people who lie about their age. The tool tries to identify users under the age of 18, and then automatically applies stricter data protection settings to their account. According to Allison Hartnett, Meta’s youth and social impact product director, the software tries to determine the real age by examining a combination of several indicators, for example, based on the accounts the user follows and content and interactions of interest to them.
If, based on these, it appears that the user is under 18 years of age, he will automatically be classified as a teenager, regardless of the age he declares in the settings. For the time being, it is questionable how accurately the solution works and with what margin of error, what options there will be for appeal in case of wrong categorization.
In September, Meta introduced enhanced privacy and parental controls for Instagram users under 18 to ease concerns and criticism about the social media’s harmful effects. The system automatically handles the accounts of teenagers with special markings, which are given private visibility by default, so the affected account owners can only exchange messages with other accounts they have followed back or are already in an active relationship with.
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Users under the age of 16 can only change these default settings with parental permission. The expanded parental toolkit has brought new monitoring functions, including the ability to track who the minor interacts with on the platform, as well as the ability to set various limits on the use of the application.
Those under the age of 18 will receive a notification in the application after exceeding 60 minutes a day that it is worth taking a break from using the app, and sleep mode has become the default, which silences notifications at night. Meta has started the reclassification of identified users for the time being in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and the European Union region will follow sometime later this year.
Although Facebook, Instagram and TikTok allow new users to register from the age of 13 on paper, this is difficult to verify in practice. The new tools introduced to Instagram are being released live by Meta after it abandoned the development of the version of the app specifically intended for teenagers a few years ago. In July, the US Senate introduced two bills related to youth online safety, the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, which would force social media operators to take responsibility for the effects on teens’ mental health.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
