Brussels Wants Your Kid's ID Before They Can Open an App
Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the EU KIDS Act in Strasbourg on Thursday. Under 13: no social media or video-sharing accounts. Ages 13–14: only parent-supervised "mini accounts" with hard limits. Autonomous accounts start at 15. Platforms must run age assurance, turn off addictive design tricks by default, and risk fines up to 6% of global sales.
Parents already decide what their kids do online. This is the Commission deciding for every household in the bloc, then forcing platforms to collect age credentials and link kids to guardians at continental scale. Tech trade group CCIA Europe warned that pile of identity data is a cybercrime target. Privacy is not a bug of the proposal. It is the enforcement mechanism.
A phone is property. Speech is still speech when a teenager holds it. Age gates that demand government-grade verification turn parenting into a licensing regime. If Brussels can require your papers to open an app, the next rule writes itself.
Still a proposal — Parliament and the member states have to agree — but the direction is clear: the state sits between the child and the network.
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