
Instagram will ask new users to provide birthdays to cater privacy features - bookofjoe
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20995331/instagram-new-user-birthdate-account-create-age-younger-users
======
commoner
> Instagram told the news service that it won’t verify birthdates, but it
> thinks people will be honest about their birthdays, and it might eventually
> rely on artificial intelligence to help determine users’ birthdays.
> Instagram employees can already roughly estimate users’ ages by going
> through posts that say “happy birthday.” It’s also already trained machine
> learning software to predict users’ ages and gender. It looks at the posts
> people make and the hashtags they use for data.

It's ironic to see Instagram/Facebook claim that they are demanding more
personal information "to cater privacy features." The data will obviously be
used for training their machine learning models, which will be used for
targeted advertising.

