THE European Commission has proposed the EU Kids Act, which would prohibit children under 13 from using social media and allow adolescents under 15 to use accounts only with parental supervision. The proposal would apply across the EU’s 27 member states, covering about 450 million people, and would require users to verify their age before accessing social media and potentially other online services.
The report says the measure would introduce age-based access policies for websites and services, building on existing age-verification obligations under the Digital Services Act.
The Commission plans to develop an open-source verification tool for use across member states. National authorities would decide which organisations—potentially digital-identity providers, banks or post offices—deploy and manage it. The proposed system would not create a central age database or send users’ age or identity information to the EU. Instead, websites would read a Boolean value stored on a user’s phone indicating whether they had reached the legally required age, then decide whether to provide access.
The approach is intended to avoid requiring users to submit documents or selfies directly to individual services, reducing the amount of sensitive information they share.
The Kids Act remains a proposal and must be considered and voted on by EU member states and the European Parliament. No implementation date has been confirmed.