CNN

Instagram is testing AI that verifies your age with a selfie scan. It’s not perfect

Jun 27, 2022, 11:27 AM | Updated: Feb 13, 2023, 2:42 pm
FILE: The Instagram app logo is displayed on an iPhone on Aug. 3, 2016, in London, England.  (Photo...
FILE: The Instagram app logo is displayed on an iPhone on Aug. 3, 2016, in London, England. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
(Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

(CNN) — Instagram is testing new ways to verify its youngest users’ ages, including by using artificial intelligence that analyzes a photo and estimates how old the user is.

Meta-owned Instagram said in a blog post on Thursday that AI is one of three new methods it’s testing to verify users’ ages on the photo-sharing site. Users will be required to use one of the options to verify their age if they edit their birth date on Instagram from under age 18 to over 18. Instagram is testing these options first with its users in the United States. It already requires users to state their age when they start using the service, and employs AI in other ways to determine if users are kids or adults.

The move is part of an ongoing push to make sure the photo-sharing app’s youngest users see content that is age-appropriate. It comes less than a year after disclosures from a Facebook whistleblower raised concerns about the platform’s impact on younger users. Last year, Instagram came under fire when documents leaked by the whistleblower, Frances Haugen, showed it was aware of how the social media site can damage mental health and body image, particularly among teenage girls.

The technology comes from a London-based company called Yoti. An animated video that Instagram posted to its blog gives a sense for how Yoti’s AI age-estimation works: A user is directed to take a video selfie on their smartphone (Yoti said this step serves as a way to make sure a real person is in the resulting image), and Instagram shares an image from that selfie with the company. Yoti’s AI first detects that there is a face in the picture and then scrutinizes its facial features to determine the person’s age.

Julie Dawson, Yoti’s chief policy and regulatory officer, told CNN Business that its AI was trained with a dataset made up of images of people’s faces along with the year and month that person was born. (Documentation the company released in May to explain its technology said it was trained on “millions of diverse facial images.”)

“When a new face comes along, it does a pixel-level analysis of that face and then spits out a number — the age estimation with a confidence value,” Dawson said. Once the estimation is completed, Yoti and Instagram delete the selfie video and the still image taken from it.

Verifying a user’s age can be a vexing problem for tech companies, in part because plenty of users may not have a government-issued photo ID card that can be checked.

Karl Ricanek, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and director of the school’s Face Aging Group Research Lab, thinks Yoti’s technology is a good application of AI.

“It’s a worthwhile endeavor to try and protect kids,” he said.

Yet while such technology could be helpful to Instagram, a number of factors can make it tricky to accurately estimate age from a picture, Ricanek said, including puberty — which changes a person’s facial structure — as well as skin tone and gender.

The recent documentation from Yoti indicates its technology is, on average, slightly less accurate at estimating the ages of kids who are between 13 to 17 and have darker skin tones than those with lighter skin tones. According to Yoti’s data, its age estimate was off, on average, by 1.91 years for females ages 13 to 17 whose skin tones were categorized as the two darkest shades on the Fitzpatrick scale — a six-shade scale that’s commonly used by tech companies to classify colors of skin — versus an average error of 1.41 years for females in the same age group whose skin tones were the two lightest shades on the scale. For kids between the ages of 13 to 17, the technology’s estimate of how old they are was off by 1.56 years, on average, according to the document. (For teenagers overall, the average error rate is 1.52 years.)

What that means, in practice, is that there will be a lot of errors, said Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, who studies the ethical and social implications of AI. “We’re still taking about a mean absolute error, either way, of a year to a year and a half,” he said.

Several CNN employees — all adults over the age of 25 — tried an online demo of Yoti’s age-estimation technology. The demo differs from the experience Instagram users will have in that it takes a selfie, rather than a short video, and the result is an age-range estimation, rather than a specific age estimation, Yoti’s chief marketing officer, Chris Field, said.

The results varied: For a couple of reporters, the estimated age range was right on target, but for others it was off by many years. For instance, it estimated one editor was between the ages of 17 and 21, when they’re actually in their mid-30s.

Among other issues, Stark is also concerned that the technology will contribute to so-called “surveillance creep.”

“It’s certainly problematic, because it conditions people to assume they’re going to be surveilled and assessed,” he said.

The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

KSL 5 TV Live

Top Stories

CNN

Almost two months after a train carrying hazardous materials derailed in the town of East Palestine...
Brenda Goodman

Government to step up efforts to monitor health of East Palestine residents, first responders

Almost two months after a train carrying hazardous materials derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio, the state Department of Health is preparing to offer blood and urine testing and physical exams to first responders who rushed to fight the blaze.
1 day ago
Local officials say they are standing with the six people killed Monday in a shooting at the Covena...
Eric Levenson and Jennifer Henderson

Victims of Nashville school shooting identified

An armed person fatally shot three 9-year-old students and three adults at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville.
1 day ago
Scammer holds smartphone, cracks two-factor authentication, steals money online...
Sean Lyngaas

US bans government agencies from using spyware ‘operationally’ as national security concerns grow

President Biden on Monday issued an executive order banning US government agencies from using invasive commercial hacking tools.
1 day ago
Venus and Jupiter are exceptionally close to one another in an artist's rendering.
(themotioncloud/...
Jackie Wattles

A stunning lineup of five planets will decorate the night sky

Onlookers will be able to catch the best glimpse of the alignment — which will include Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus — on Tuesday evening, just after sunset.
2 days ago
Samples of Beethoven's hair allowed researchers to sequence the composer's DNA.
(Ira F. Brilliant C...
shley Strickland

DNA analysis of Beethoven’s hair reveals health issues, family secret

A team of researchers stepped into history by using DNA analysis to understand an important figure in classical music a little bit better
2 days ago
An Eastern Grey Kangaroo is seen on November 25, 2022 in Coffs Harbour, Australia. As spring gives ...
Hilary Whiteman and George Ramsay

Australia loves its kangaroos so much it sets quotas to kill them

Kangaroos are on Australia's coat of arms and the tail of the national airline, but every year state authorities allow licensed hunters to kill millions of them.
2 days ago

Sponsored Articles

Stack of old laptops with dark background...
PC Laptops

Old Laptop Upgrades You Need to Try Before Throwing it Away

Get the most out of your investment. Try these old laptop upgrades before throwing it out to keep it running fast and efficient.
Happy diverse college or university students are having fun on their graduation day...
BYU MBA at the Marriott School of Business

How to Choose What MBA Program is Right for You: Take this Quiz Before You Apply!

Wondering what MBA program is right for you? Take this quiz before you apply to see if it will help you meet your goals.
Close up of an offset printing machine during production...
Les Olson IT

Top 7 Reasons to Add a Production Printer to Your Business

Learn about the different digital production printers and how they can help your company save time and money.
vintage photo of lighting showroom featuring chandeliers, lamps, wall lights and mirrors...
Lighting Design

History of Lighting Design | Over 25 Years of Providing Utah With the Latest Trends and Styles

Read about the history of Lighting Design, a family-owned and operated business that paved the way for the lighting industry in Utah.
Fiber Optical cables connected to an optic ports and Network cables connected to ethernet ports...
Brian Huston, CE and Anthony Perkins, BICSI

Why Every Business Needs a Structured Cabling System

A structured cabling system benefits businesses by giving you faster processing speeds and making your network more efficient and reliable.
notebook with password notes highlighted...
PC Laptops

How to Create Strong Passwords You Can Actually Remember

Learn how you can create strong passwords that are actually easy to remember! In a short time you can create new ones in seconds.
Instagram is testing AI that verifies your age with a selfie scan. It’s not perfect