Windows 11 will learn to detect a user's age category

Microsoft is adding a set of new APIs to Windows 11 aimed at determining a user's age category. According to Bleeping Computer, these interfaces will let apps find out whether a person falls into the category of children, teenagers or adults — but without access to the exact date of birth.

The idea is to let developers tailor how their products behave to the user's age, without collecting excessive personal data in the process. The app receives only a generalized category rather than specific age information, which should reduce the risks associated with handling sensitive data about minors.

This approach fits into a broader trend: regulators in various countries are tightening requirements for protecting children online and increasingly obliging services to verify the age of their audience. A mechanism built in at the operating-system level potentially spares individual developers from having to build their own age-verification schemes and hands the task off to the platform.

Because the APIs return only an age category rather than a full date of birth, Microsoft positions the solution as a compromise between apps' need to account for age and the user's right to privacy. How well that balance works out in practice will depend on exactly how apps end up using the new capabilities.

Source: Bleeping Computer