In recent days, the EU’s Age Verification application has been the subject of intense public discussion. Many positive comments from family associations and also comments some critical on technical aspects, plenty of serious and constructive comments. Some critical voices have little to do with child protection.
The information and views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of European institutions.
Let me underline something that should always be kept in mind.
The Age Verification app is one small tile in a much larger mosaic. It is one component of a broader European strategy to protect children online. We are talking about a generation growing up inside digital environments engineered to capture their attention, exploit their cognitive vulnerabilities, and convert their behaviour into commercial value. According to the European Commission, 97% of young people in the EU use the internet daily, and more than one in ten show signs of problematic use. This is a public health question, a civic question, and a question about what kind of Europe we want to leave to our children.
For decades, the “protection” of minors online has meant clicking “Yes, I am over 18” on a self-declaration page. That standard has protected no one. The absence of verification has never been the defence of children’s freedom. It has been the freedom of platforms to reach them.
Some argue that it is not the role of the State to protect children online, it is the role of parents. This is a comfortable position, but it is not an honest one. No parent, however attentive, can compensate alone for digital environments designed on an industrial scale to manipulate behaviour. Placing the full weight of child protection on families is not a defence of parental authority. It is the quiet transfer of a systemic problem onto the household, leaving the architecture that produces the harm entirely intact. Parents have a role. So does the school and civil society. So does the State. So does the EU. Protecting children has always been a shared responsibility this is also valid in the digital environment.
That is why to help families the EU is proposing to utilise privacy-preserving, open-source, interoperable tools that confirm a user is over a given age without revealing anything else. No name. No date of birth. No photograph. No identity. I wonder how this can be considered surveillance. It is the opposite of surveillance. It is what privacy-by-design looks like when it is taken seriously.
An internet without age verification is not an internet without control. It is an internet where control is already exercised, privately, opaquely, by a handful of on-line platforms whose business model is to extract, organise, and monetise human behaviour. This is surveillance. Criticising the introduction of a privacy-preserving open-source tool while accepting the existing private architecture as natural is not the defence of freedom on-line. It is the defence of the status quo.
The Age Verification application is one tile among many in this mosaic. Open-source applications to empower citizens and give them and rules to held platforms responsible for not creating harm to kids on-line are not separate initiatives. They are tiles of the same design: a coherent attempt to build a free and safe on-line space.
This is a project that should unite. Not uncritically: the work must be rigorous, scrutiny by the community should be ferocious, the implementations strengthened through open review. But I hope we should be united on the fundamentals. That children deserve protection. That they have the right to develop their own critical thinking in a mind still taking shape, free from cognitive manipulation designed to capture and exploit them. That privacy is a right. That public digital infrastructure is worth building. And that we in Europe have both the capacity and the obligation to do this work.
The debate is not about age verification. It is about what kind of digital Europe we are willing to build, and whether we are willing to look at the whole mosaic, not just one tile.
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