The Facebook owned photo sharing app Instagram will now make it mandatory for users to add their birthdays to their profiles on the app. The move comes after Facebook’s recent announcement of not allowing advertisers to target anything other than age and location for showing ads to minors.

In the announcement, the social media giant also revealed that adults won’t be allowed to contact users under the age of 18 years without their permission. 

“This information allows us to create new safety features for young people, and helps ensure we provide the right experiences to the right age group,” the company said in a blog post. 

“This information also allows us to personalize your experience, for example, we can apply recent changes we made to restrict advertiser targeting options for audiences under the age of 18, to more people. It also helps us show you more relevant ads,” it added.

Talking about the new restriction, the company said that it will start showing a notification which will ask users for their birthdays when the open the app next time. 

The notification will only be shown to the users who haven’t already added their birthdays. “We’ll show you a notification a handful of times and if you haven’t provided us with your birthday by a certain point, you’ll need to share it to continue using Instagram. This information is necessary for new features we’re developing to protect young people,” the post says.

Also the age will help to determine age warnings on required posts. The AI will estimate how old people are based on things like “Happy Birthday” posts, said the company.

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