AgeGuard

• Idea Title: AgeGuard
• Idea Description: We’re proactively blocking content from underage users through a prediction system that uses AI to determine a user’s age by analyzing their network, behavior and other signals.
• Contributors: Masaya, Shubhi, Sandra, Ashish, Nithisha, Jiazheng, Lucia, Carolina
• Point of contact: nithisha@umich.edu

There is no foolproof way to ensure only users of appropriate age are using a specific platform (this usually relies on user inputs, making it relatively unreliable).  Different age groups are vulnerable to different threats. Underage users are specifically affected by inappropriate content and they’re the most prioritized vulnerable group by many companies like Google.

We will develop an LLM to predict the age of a user with a high degree of confidence. A dataset to train, test, and validate the model could be constructed by verifying the age of a fixed number of users (through parental control features in the app like Instagram family center, Google family link) and then analyzing specific factors associated w/ them to understand trends:

• The age the accounts that these users are connected to
• Login times of the users of a specific age
• If the predicted age of the user doesn’t match with their reported age, we will take action like not showing certain content to them (like politics, sexually inappropriate content) etc.