Instagram will demand your date of birth for safety — and ads, of course

Instagram is making a new change to its policy, that will require users to submit their date of birth to the company. If you don’t share your birthday after repeated reminders, you won’t be able to use the service.

The company said that this feature will help it improve user safety, and allow the platform to build out more features to that end. Over the past few months, Instagram has built a ton of tools related to teen safety. In March, it rolled out an AI-powered feature to prevent adults from messaging kids. Last month, it made all new accounts aged under 16 private by default.

If you haven’t added your birthday while joining in, Instagram will show you a notification related to it multiple times — like the one shown below.

The company also plans to restrict certain content based on different age groups. It’ll ask you to share your birthday — if you haven’t shared it — before seeing content that might be sensitive.

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However, there’s a quirk to this new change. Instagram wasn’t shy in admitting that this will help it show “you more relevant ads.” This bit irks me. I get that as a social media platform, you need to add age restriction as a feature, but using that information for ads is a snarky move. But then again, we’re talking about a Facebook-owned company.

There’s also no information as to if advertisers will get access to the information about you being an adult, or get specific birthdates too. We’ve asked the company to share more details, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.

You can read more about Instagram’s birthday sharing policy here.