Instagram might ask you for your birth date the next time you open the app. Instagram, which I’ll remind you, is owned by Facebook, one of the most prolific collectors and resellers of personal data on the planet.

C’mon, Instagram. You know my birthday. You know the birthdays of all my friends and family, and all their friends and family until we hit Kevin Bacon a hundred times over. You know my dog’s birthday.

According to the somewhat apologetic blog post, the gathered information will be used to protect children and minors, which already default to private mode. The new info will make advertising more restrictive to anyone under the age of 18. The post says that Instagram already has the data for a majority of its users (oh do you now?), but that it’s tracking down the rest via a pop-up.

At first users will be able to bypass the prompt to enter their birthdates. But it’ll be unavoidable if you’re trying to access posts marked graphic, and eventually adding that info will become mandatory for using the Instagram service.

“That’s fine,” I hear you thinking. “I’ll just give them a made-up birthday!” Stop right there, criminal scum. Facebook’s working on that.

As we shared recently, we’re using artificial intelligence to estimate how old people are based on things like “Happy Birthday” posts. In the future, if someone tells us they’re above a certain age, and our technology tells us otherwise, we’ll show them a menu of options to verify their age.

Well that’s not creepy, Facebook. Not creepy at all.

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