Europe doesn’t need an “internet passport” for age verification

Obviously, over the years, many online services, websites, apps and so on have had age restrictions, at least nominally.

So you would have had certain adult websites asking, are you over 18 before you can enter this website? Social media services saying you have to be over 13 to use this.

And generally speaking, people have just gone, yes, I'm over 18, yes, I'm over 13, and in they go, which has led to a big push over the last few years for age verification to be brought in, real age verification to keep children out of these services that they should not be accessing.

But it's important to remember that this isn't purely about age gating.

It's part of a wider push to make children safer online, which is something I think most people can agree is a good thing.

And so we've had the Online Safety Acts in Australia in 2021, in the UK a few years ago, and these are really starting to bite now.

So there is experience that Europe can look at as it tries to bring in its own version of these safety laws.

Now, at the moment, we're seeing a lot of European countries pushing forward with their own national laws, trying to restrict access to social media to certain ages.

France, Spain, etc., etc.

But they all have different ideas about what age it should be, slight variations in what types of things should be covered, and so on.

which makes things very complicated when you're talking about the European Union, which is supposed to be a single market.

Indeed, the European Commission told France earlier this month that it has to amend its bill for introducing a minimum age of 15 for social media because it risks complicating things too much, might clash with existing EU law, and this really should be dealt with at the EU level instead.

So what does EU law actually say about minimum ages for social media and other online services? It's implied rather than explicit.

You have the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, Europe's world-famous privacy law, which says that it's generally not legal to process the personal data of under-13s unless you have parental permission.

So it's kind of implied there, but there is get-out.

You have the Digital Services Act, which came in a couple of years ago, which does talk about age assurance, but it doesn't prescribe exactly what that should look like, what age limits should be, and so on.

And so now we're moving towards the introduction of an EU-wide law that will explicitly set out a minimum age for accessing social media and other online services, same age regardless of the country.

That will keep enforcement simpler.

It'll also make compliance a lot simpler because it'd be an absolute nightmare.

Say you have a user who's 15 years old and they can use Facebook in this country, but they can't use it in that country.

People cross borders.

This is the point of the European Union.

But the other reason that I'm glad to see the introduction of some kind of proper EU-wide legislation is because it'll ensure democratic debate, which is something that has been severely lacking in this discussion so far.

something I complained about in a recent video.

Link up above.