Europe Pushes Age-Verification System for Kids: Here’s How It Works

Supporters said the system balanced safety and privacy, while critics warned enforcement would be difficult and could expand digital ID requirements.

This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Sept. 18, 2024. Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images

France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Greece are set to test what the European Union Commission calls its “blueprint” for an age verification app for children across the 27-member state bloc.

The app’s prototype was announced on July 14 alongside guidelines that online platforms are recommended to adopt to comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

Supporters say it is a privacy-conscious alternative to systems like China’s facial recognition scans.

Meanwhile, critics warn it could pave the way for mandatory digital ID checks across the internet, shifting power from parents to platforms.

European Digital Identity Wallets

The EU Commission said that the initiative aims to allow European users to prove they are old enough to legally access age-restricted sites, starting with being over 18 years of age for accessing adult-restricted online content, such as pornography, gambling, purchasing alcohol, and others.

The five countries can adapt the model according to their requirements, integrate it into a national app, or keep it separately.

The commission said that the tech is built on the same technical specifications as the European Digital Identity Wallets (eID) that are to be rolled out before the end of 2026.

The eIDs will be for every EU citizen so they can prove who they are when accessing digital services, for example, opening a new bank account.

Several countries are trialing or implementing age verification tech for online platforms.

The United Kingdom and Australia both do so via their own Online Safety Acts. Canberra has passed a law to prevent Australian children under the age of 16 from having social media accounts.

Governments from Singapore to Indonesia and China are increasingly introducing age-verification systems.

‘Designed Differently’

Derek Jackson, chief operations officer and co-founder of Cyber Dive, a tech company founded with the mission of keeping children safe online, told The Epoch Times by email that in China, age verification commonly relies on facial recognition.

“Here’s how [the Chinese system] works in practice: when someone logs into a social media app or a video game, their face is scanned by the app and then matched instantly against a central government database,” he said.

“Think of this like having your photo and ID stored at one giant central library. Every time you need to prove your age, the app quickly calls the government-owned library to check if your face matches,” he added.

“The advantage is clear: It’s fast, very accurate, and simple for the user. But the trade-off is significant: your face, your identity, and all your personal data are stored centrally by the government.

“You don’t directly control your personal information; it’s all managed by someone else, and that someone else is the government.”

He said the EU’s prototype, on the other hand, is “designed differently.”

“It’s more like carrying around your own personal wallet or keychain, rather than relying on a centralized library. The idea is based around what’s called a ‘digital wallet,’ which most people are familiar with in cryptocurrency transactions,” he added.

In terms of governments rather than private companies being responsible for verification, he said: “The more players you have creating their own rules, the more confusing, insecure, and exploitative the landscape becomes.”

Jackson said, “We need society-wide safeguards.”

“Parents alone shouldn’t bear responsibility for navigating digital dangers they can’t possibly control,” he added.

“If we’re serious about protecting children from adverse childhood experiences online, like exploitation, exposure to traumatic content, or manipulative designs that erode mental health, then safety must be redefined as a collective responsibility rather than an individual illusion.

“Parents must accept their limits, society must acknowledge its broader duty, and together, we must establish clear, enforceable rules and protections,” he said.

Parental Authority

Norman Lewis, visiting research fellow at the think tank MCC Brussels and formerly PwC director and director of technology research at Orange UK, told The Epoch Times that the EU’s push for age verification “sets a precedent.”

“It institutionalizes the idea that the commission should now play a role directly in the private lives of citizens, in a critical area of the relationship between parents and their children,” he said.

“The point about young kids in technology is that as soon as you put a barrier up to them, they'll find a way around it,” he added.

“There should be some protections, but the protections should be based upon the negotiation between the children and their parents and the parental authority,” he said.

“They are cynically using the issue of children and child safety online as a way of bringing in a system which is essentially going ... to impose age verification across everything,” he said.

‘Zero-Knowledge Proofs’

Komninos Chatzipapas, founder and director of Orion AI Software, told The Epoch Times by email that a centralized device-level system provided by governments may be more secure than private-sector verification systems like those used in the United States.

He pointed to the potential use of zero-knowledge proofs in the EU prototype, a method of proving the validity of a statement without revealing anything other than the validity of the statement itself.

“The system will be close to watertight because the ID information won’t actually be sent to the verification system at all,” he said.

“It sounds counter-intuitive, but with ZK proofs [zero-knowledge proofs] it’s possible to prove just that you’re over 18 without revealing any other ID data,” he added.

He said that such sites are “very easy to bypass using a free VPN,” he added.

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, a technology that allows users to establish a secure and encrypted connection over the internet.

The UK’s Online Safety Act requires social media companies to enforce their age limits consistently and puts the onus on all sites and apps that allow pornography to have strong age checks in place.

For example, Reddit has recently introduced age verification on its UK site to stop people aged under 18 from looking at “certain mature content.”

In response, Ofcom, the UK regulator, said on LinkedIn: “We expect other companies to follow suit, or face enforcement if they fail to act.”

Reddit said that from July 14, a third-party provider called Persona will perform age verification for the social media platform either through an uploaded selfie or “a photo of your government ID,” such as a passport.

“Reddit will not have access to the uploaded photo, and Reddit will only store your verification status along with the birthdate you provided so you won’t have to re-enter it each time you try to access restricted content,” it said.

Safeguarding Core Freedoms

Together Declaration, a prominent anti-lockdown and pro-free-speech advocacy group in the UK, is calling for a “Digital Bill of Rights” to safeguard core freedoms in the digital age.

It recently launched a new campaign as the UK government is exploring the potential benefits and risks of the use of government-issued digital ID.

Together Association cofounder Alan Miller told The Epoch Times that he has a problem with age verification because “it forces everyone to basically have a digital ID, mandatory to log online effectively, because everyone has to now prove that they are something. “

“We’re against the imposition of it because it generalizes it for everyone,” said Miller.