As world governments breathe down Meta‘s neck, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram has unveiled a new layer of protection for users under the age of 18. Those youngsters will be subjected to age verification technology that will scan context clues to determine which accounts need to be placed into the Teen Account experience.
For months, Meta has teased an AI-powered solution that will protect vulnerable users across all of the tech company’s platforms. Now, that safeguard is here. Days after E.U. regulators concluded that Meta has not done enough to keep kids off of Facebook and Instagram, the Big Tech firm published a blog post that shares details about the forms of age verification it has installed thus far.
Meta’s post makes clear that its current suite of safety solutions does not include facial recognition technology. Instead, its AI-powered tools will scan for telltale signs of a user’s underage status. Those signs could include mentions of school grades or birthday parties, as well as certain bone structures in posted photos, but Meta’s AI will not identify the specific persons depicted in those images.
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“By combining these visual insights with our analysis of text and interactions, we can significantly increase the number of underage accounts we identify and remove,” reads the blog post.
As companies like YouTube and Roblox have answered regulatory concerns by adopting their own forms of age verification, the interaction between those tools and data privacy has come under scrutiny. Age verification systems can appease government officials, protect underage users, and even enable new forms of advertising, but they’re inherently invasive. Some critics have argued that the protection provided by age verification is not worth the drawbacks.
By eschewing facial recognition, Meta hopes to answer those data privacy concerns. There’s still the question, however, of how the kids themselves will react. Under-18s have already found plenty of ways to sidestep national social media bans. Now, they’ll try to apply those evasive maneuvers to Meta’s platforms.
