What a pain reading this blog post. It's about them complying with recent regulations, but they never mention it once: they word it so it sounds like they are doing this out of the good of their hearts. The words "law," "regulation," or "compliance" do not appear once, despite being the entire reason the post exists.

Also on the "privacy-preserving tool", technically apps get a bracket ("16–17") instead of a birthdate. But who holds the actual data? Google. The privacy improvement is against the developer only.

Google has always had your birthday.