On 14 July 2025, the European Commission published guidance to help online platforms protect minors under the Digital Services Act. The Commission also published a prototype age-verification application intended to make age checks online more privacy-preserving.
Guidance on protecting minors online
The European Commission’s guidance is designed to raise privacy, safety, and protection standards for children and teenagers on online platforms. This follows a consultation process that included input from young people. The guidance is risk-based and recognizes that different services pose different types and levels of risk depending on their nature, size, purpose, and user base.
Key recommendations include:
- Reducing “addictive design” features that can encourage compulsive use by minors, including features such as “streaks” and message “read receipts.”
- Addressing cyberbullying by making it easy for minors to block or mute users, preventing minors from being added to groups without explicit consent, and recommending measures to deter unwanted redistribution of minors’ content. This includes functionality limiting the ability of accounts to capture and share minors’ posted content via screenshots or downloads.
- Limiting exposure to harmful content by giving young users more control over what they see and prioritizing explicit user feedback over behavioral tracking in recommendation systems; if a young user signals they do not want a certain type of content, it should not be recommended again.
- Reducing unwanted contact from strangers by setting minors’ accounts to private by default, so they are not visible to users outside their friends list.
Prototype age-verification application
The European Commission also presented a prototype age-verification application intended as a privacy-protective “gold standard” for age assurance online. The prototype is designed to let people prove, for example, that they are over 18 to access adult-restricted content without sharing other unnecessary personal data such as identity and exact age.
The prototype will be tested and further adapted with European Union Member States, online platforms, and end users. Denmark, Greece, Spain, France, and Italy are identified as the first countries to work with the European Commission toward launching national age-verification applications. The prototype could be integrated into a national application or remain standalone.
The guidance provides guidance on when and how platforms should check users’ age, recommending age verification for adult-content platforms and other platforms that pose high risks to minors’ safety. It says age-assurance methods should be accurate, reliable, robust, nonintrusive, and unbiased.
Further reference
The European Commission highlights that the age-verification is based on the same technical specifications as the European digital identity wallets expected to be deployed before the end of 2026, to ensure compatibility and potential future integration.
The European Commission’s original press release is available here.
The European Commission’s press release on the publication of its guidelines are available here.
The full official guidelines published by the European Commission are available here.