Age verification on Seldeo

The rules we work under

Seldeo has a minimum age of 13 in most of the world and 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, matching the applicable data-protection thresholds (COPPA in the United States, the GDPR children's provisions in the EEA, and the UK GDPR / Age Appropriate Design Code in the UK). Some national app-store availability limits are higher; where they apply, we honour them at the sign-up step.

Two facts drive the design of the flow you'll actually see:

1. Almost every under-age user who reaches the sign-up screen knows the rule and will attempt to work around it if we present a single "enter your birthdate" field.
2. Almost every over-age user finds age-verification friction irritating and, at some threshold of friction, will drop out of the sign-up entirely.

Getting this right is not about picking a "smart" system. It's about layering a small number of soft checks with clear recourse for people who are told "no" and shouldn't be.

What happens on sign-up

At sign-up, we ask you for your date of birth. That single field:

• Is stored on your account.
• Is used to compute your age at sign-up and again on each birthday.
• Is never shown to other users.
• Is not shared with advertisers. (Ads on the Seldeo mobile app default to non-personalised for accounts under 18.)

If the birthdate you enter puts you at or above the applicable minimum age for your country, sign-up continues. Otherwise, the account is placed in an age-locked state and, in jurisdictions where it applies, the flow transitions into the regulatory pathway (parental consent for COPPA, an age-verification step for the UK Age Appropriate Design Code).

Why we don't collect ID at sign-up

Government-ID checks are the standard mechanism for hard age gates on the internet, and there is a reason nobody enjoys them: they collect enormously more data than the question "are you old enough?" needs. Handing a name, address, ID number, and photo of a minor's face to a social network in order to prove they are old enough to use it is a bad trade.

We do not ask for ID at sign-up, and we do not ask for ID as part of ordinary account use. There is exactly one place ID verification can appear:

• On appeal when an account is age-locked, the account holder may prove age by submitting an identity document through our verification partner. The document is reviewed, a pass/fail plus age-band signal is returned to Seldeo, and the underlying document is destroyed. We do not receive or retain a copy of the document itself.

Everything else — the age-band on the account, whether the account is under-18 for advertising purposes, whether COPPA parental consent is required — is derived from the birthdate you entered.

Signals we use after sign-up

We also apply a small number of behavioural signals to catch under-age accounts that slipped past the sign-up field. These are deliberately conservative — we would rather leave occasional false negatives than escalate a false positive against a real teenager who happens to write in a specific way.

The main signals:

• Self-reported age in comments or profile bio. A user who writes "I'm 12" in their bio has just given us the answer.
• Trusted-adult reports. If a parent, teacher, or guardian reports an account they know to be a minor's, we review that report as high priority.
• Age-related behavioural clustering. Not language-model-based content scraping — a small set of interaction patterns (interactions with content specifically targeted to older users, and vice versa) that we use only as an input to a human reviewer, not as a standalone gate.

If any of those signals is triggered strongly enough, the account is flagged for human review. A human decides, not an algorithm. If we age-lock the account, the account holder receives an in-app and email notification with a clear appeal path.

What happens when an account is age-locked

Age-locking an account:

• Immediately signs the user out of the app.
• Marks the account as inactive to friends and profile visitors ("This account is unavailable"). We do not surface "This account is under review" to third parties — the reason for the state is between us and the account holder.
• Freezes new posts, new messages, and new follows.
• Preserves all existing data for the standard retention window described in Delete account — 30 days before permanent deletion, so a successful appeal restores a full account rather than a hollowed-out one.

The account holder receives an email at the address on file, with a link to the appeal.

The appeal

The appeal path has three steps:

1. Self-declared correction. If the birthdate on file was entered incorrectly at sign-up, the account holder can submit a corrected birthdate. In some jurisdictions, this alone is enough to unlock the account. In others, a second step is required.
2. ID verification via partner. For jurisdictions that require a stronger check, the account holder is directed to our verification partner. The partner returns a pass/fail and an age-band. Documents are not shared with Seldeo.
3. Human review. If the automated path fails or is inapplicable, our Trust & Safety team reviews the remaining evidence and makes a decision. All decisions are appealable to a second reviewer.

The end-to-end median time for an age-appeal to complete is 72 hours. We know that is a long time for someone locked out of their account, and we track that number publicly in the Transparency Report.

What under-18 accounts look like inside the app

Accounts we know to be under 18 default to a set of stricter privacy and safety settings:

• Discoverability. Not surfaced in "People you may know" suggestions to accounts outside the user's friends-of-friends radius.
• Direct messages. Cannot receive DMs from accounts outside their friends list.
• Advertising. Ads are non-personalised. Ad Manager sends a request with tfua=1 and, where applicable, tfcd=1, which respectively signal "tag for users under the age of consent" and "tag for child-directed treatment." See our Privacy Policy for details.
• Search visibility. The account's public posts are not indexed by external search engines even if the account otherwise allows public posting.

What we don't do

• We do not use facial-age estimation. It doesn't meet our accuracy bar for a decision this consequential.
• We do not maintain a per-account "age confidence" score that shrinks silently as behavioural signals accumulate. An account is either age-locked (with notice and appeal) or it isn't.
• We do not share age status with advertisers, even in aggregate. Advertising systems on Seldeo see "personalised eligible: yes / no" — never a specific age or age-band.

If you're a parent or a guardian

The right entry point is safety@seldeo.com. If you have reason to believe a Seldeo account belongs to a minor and should be reviewed, please write to that address with the username and a short note. Reports from named parents and guardians are prioritised.

We also publish the Community Guidelines and the safety posts on this news feed as material you can share with a young person you want to educate before they hit any of our safety rails.

What we still owe you

• A clearer, in-app "why this account is locked" screen on first sign-in after locking.
• Faster appeal turnaround. Our target is 24 hours; our current median is 72.
• Published false-positive rate in the Transparency Report.

Age verification is a place where the industry-standard answer is either much too weak (a single birthdate field) or much too invasive (mandatory ID for everyone). We are trying to sit between those, and to be honest about it. If you have specific feedback, policy@seldeo.com is the right address.