Politics · de.indymedia · · 56m
EU Kids Act: This law doesn't make things better for parents, it makes them worse
Deutsch (original) · Auto-translated to English
With the planned Kids Act, the EU Commission is relying on age controls and proof of custody. But who will protect my children from grooming, extremism and data-hungry corporations? Not this law. A comment.
Apparently this avalanche could no longer be stopped. Under increasing pressure from countries such as France, Denmark and most recently Germany,https://netzpolitik.org/2026/eu-kids-act-eu-kommission-will-netz-mit-alt...enforce the EU Commissionthat a minimum age should apply to large parts of the Internet.
As a parent of two children, I read this draft with feelings of powerlessness and frustration. Yes, the EU wants to protect young people from intrusive contact attempts by adults; it wants to prevent apps with endless feeds from enticing them to spend endless time on their cell phones. She wants children under 13 to no longer be on YouTube, Instagram or Fortnite and people under 15 to have very limited options. Parents should remain in control. That sounds good at first.
The only problem is: In practice, these plans do not solve any of the problems that me and my children face in our everyday digital lives. For me as a parent, a closer look at the Kids Act shows one thing above all: how little the EU Commission really knows about the everyday lives of families in times of surveillance capitalism.
Part-time job: Device admin for my children
We spend hours setting up devices so that all of the apps and services essential to my children run as they should. My children should not be screened by corporations and plastered with advertising. We don't want them to accidentally post their names on high score boards or upload pictures of our living rooms to apps to be revealed to the gathered audience on the internet.
That causes work. After work, we have to do painstaking, detailed work to revoke a lot of permissions, prevent contact options, deactivate push notifications, activate websites manually and release screen time in 15-minute chunks. We need to delve deeply into every single app on the device because if we don't, our children will surely do it. And they are highly competent at finding opportunities for unauthorized gaming, mischief and fun, even in applications like the calculator.
When I'm done with this - which I never will be, as experts call ithttps://joanganzcooneycenter.org/publication/the-family-tech-cycle/">als“Family Tech Cycle”- then I haven't even started talking to my children about all the abysses that open up on the Internet: about right-wing extremists and self-proclaimed pick-up artists who want to win my children over to their extremist ideologies. About people asking her for nude pictures, about unrealistic beauty standards. About pornography and tech companies that want to record your every click and swipe.
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The technical naivety of the EU Commission
The new regulations that the EU Commission is now proposing will do little to relieve me of this. They will hardly relieve me and they will hardly ensure that my and other children are better protected online in the future. Because how easily young people with a bit of a sense of adventure can outsmart digital controls, and how cleverly large and small tech companies maneuver around guidelines, this is not a fictitious scenario. We see thathttps://netzpolitik.org/2025/histories-aus-dem-dsc-beirat-zwischen-ver...in Australia, where age controls have been largely ineffective since the beginning of the year.
Instead of relief, I see new tasks coming my way in the future. If the Kids Act becomes reality in this form, I will not only have to prove my age and that of my children that I actually have custody of my own children. This is exactly what the bill requires if legal guardians are to create monitored accounts for their children, for example on TikTok or Instagram.
I will have to obtain and submit this evidence. In the worst case, sensitive data ends up with companies like ByteDance, Google or Meta, which are known for sometimes, despite all regulations, collecting every data point that can be monetized. If the EU Commission really believes that the comprehensive controls will take place without data protection accidents and without a huge expenditure of time for everyone involved, then it is naive.
At the same time, my children will soon have to prove their age if I want to allow them to read, watch or play things online. Not just on TikTok or Instagram, but possibly already when you want to research the best cages on a guinea pig forum. Depending on how the plans are designed, all kinds of places on the internet that are not suitable for children may require some form of age control. The thresholds for this are low, and there are no exceptions for small platforms.
Scan your face or upload your passport
The planned age controls will present me with a new problem. I will once again have to consider how much of my children's privacy I reveal. Whether my children will have their faces scanned for an “age estimate” and thus entrust their unchangeable biometric data to a company that will hopefully quickly delete the recordings. Or we would rather use a control method with ID data that will hopefully be as data-efficient as the EU Commission requires in the draft.
The EU Commission has its own solution for age controlshttps://netzpolitik.org/2026/facisscan-und-handy-zwang-von-der-leyen-...data-saving age control app, presented (“Mini Wallet”). It requires identification documents and is intended to biometrically match a person's face with the scanned ID photo. While the app handles highly sensitive data, standards are intended to ensure that it only passes on a data-saving age signal to an age-restricted platform. Such an app would only be one update away from a data protection nightmare.
What the EU Commission is planning here does not so much protect the well-being of children, but rather lays the foundation for mass surveillance. Authoritarian governments can only dream of such an infrastructure for comprehensive, ID-based age controls. At the same time, the EU Commission accepts that it will completely exclude other people who simply do not have the papers for the age control app, the technical means or the knowledge to go through this process.
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The EU Commission is sawing away at the cornerstones of the Internet
If the EU Commission is interested in better protection online, it should concentrate better on what directly harms people. It could ensure that tech companies make their platforms better places, despite all the resistance from lobbyists and legal departments. There are approaches to this in the Kids Act, such as a ban on addictive mechanisms for minors on social media and video platforms.
But at this point I ask myself: Why shouldn't such safe design regulations apply to everyone instead of just to children? Settings that best protect privacy by default. Prohibit data collection and tracking. Ban manipulative designs and push notifications that keep us glued to apps for hours. We all deserve protection from this. With such rules for everyone instead of just for young people, nothing would be lost and no one would be harmed - except the profit interests of the tech companies.
Instead, the Commission's proposal affects some of the most important cornerstones of the Internet: the right to anonymity and the right to free access to information. These rights are not a luxury. They are the prerequisite for people to obtain information online and to be politically loud without hindrance. Those affected by violence, queer people, whistleblowers, and even more social groups are particularly dependent on being able to move around online without being observed. With the planned age controls, this is in jeopardy.
My children will still be on the Internet, and I will still have to accompany them as best I can and prepare them for it. But it could soon be an Internet full of barriers. And my children would have to learn: “The Internet is a place where you need state-recognized credentials to be able to participate.”
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Source: de.indymedia