instagram is testing a new way to verify the age of people using your serviceincluding AI facial scanning tools, asking mutual friends to verify their age, or uploading identity documents.

But the tool won’t be used, at least for now, to try to keep kids away from the popular photo and video sharing app. The current test consists only of verifying that the user is 18 years of age or older.

The use of facial-scanning AI, particularly among teens, raised some red flags on Thursday, given parent company Instagram Meta’s checkered track record when it comes to protecting user privacy. Meta emphasizes that the technology used to verify a person’s age cannot recognize a person’s identity, only age. Once age verification is complete, Meta says he and Yoti, the AI ​​contractor he worked with to perform the scans, will delete the video.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said that on Thursday, If someone tries to edit their date of birth on Instagram from under 18 to over 18, they will be asked to verify their age using one of these methods.

Meta continues to face questions about the negative effects of its products, especially Instagram, on some teens.

Technically, children must be at least 13 years old to use Instagram, just like any other social media platform. But some people ignore this requirement by lying about their age or asking their parents to do so. Meanwhile, teens ages 13 to 17 have additional restrictions on their accounts — for example, adults they’re not connected to cannot message them — until they turn 18.

It using the uploaded id is nothing new, but the other two options are. To use the face scan option, users have to upload a selfie video. The video was sent to Yoti, a London-based company that uses people’s facial features to estimate their age.

Yoti is one of a number of biometric companies taking advantage of UK and European pushes to improve age verification technology and prevent children from accessing pornography, dating apps and other internet content intended for adults, for example, not to mention alcohol bottles and other items prohibited in physical stores.

Yoti has teamed up with several major UK supermarkets to install facial scanning cameras at checkout counters. It also started verifying the age of users of French youth-oriented video chat app Yubo.

While Instagram is likely to live up to its promise to remove images of applicants’ faces and not seek to use them to recognize individual faces, normalizing facial scanning poses another social problem, said Daragh Murray, a senior fellow at the University of Law School. .

“This is problematic because there are a lot of known biases in trying to identify things like age or gender,” Murray said. “Basically you see stereotypes and people are very different.”

A 2019 study by a US agency found that facial recognition technology often performs unevenly based on a person’s race, gender, or age. The National Institute of Standards and Technology found higher error rates for both younger and older people. Yoti’s self-published analysis of the results revealed the same trend, with slightly higher error rates for women and those with darker skin tones.

Meta facial scanning sets itself apart from what some of its technological competitors do. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it would stop providing customers with facial analysis tools that “intend to infer” emotional states and identity attributes such as age or gender, citing concerns about “stereotypes, discrimination, or unfair denial of service.” “.

Meta announced last year that it was shutting down Facebook’s facial recognition system and removing the facial prints of more than 1 billion people after years of scrutiny by courts and regulators. At the time, however, he said he wasn’t going to give up on the technology completely, moving away from the common tagging of social media photos that helped popularize the commercial use of facial recognition toward “a more limited form of personal authentication.”