EU Kids Act: good intent, unworkable execution
Censorship blocking · 16.09.2026

Tomorrow von der Leyen will unveil the EU Kids Act to the world, but the text has already leaked — and honestly, it should have stayed in the drafts. The stated goal is noble: protect kids from toxic feeds and endless scrolling. The execution, as usual, is grand ambition backed by shoddy craftsmanship.

The minimum age for your own social media account is 15. But age verification will apply to everyone, including adults. A social network is deemed "risky" if you can message a stranger on it or see a personalized feed — which is basically any platform with normal functionality. Want to scroll TikTok at 35? Get your passport ready for the EU's age-verification app.

It gets better: the rules don't just cover social networks but also chatbots, AI companions, games, and app stores. ChatGPT, Claude, Roblox, Fortnite, the App Store, Google Play, Steam — all of them will have to either show a stripped-down kids' version or demand age verification. Catalogs with millions of apps will need to be manually re-labeled — a bureaucratic delight that'll take years.

A separate masterpiece is the wording on "age assurance": it must be accurate, reliable, secure, minimally invasive, and privacy-protecting all at once. Age-verification tech is physically incapable of being both accurate and non-invasive at the same time — it's like demanding a lock be both pickable and unpickable.

The pinnacle of lawmaking is Article 28: "any age verification measure must be zero knowledge proof." The Commission mixed up a noun with an adjective, turning a cryptographic term into a meaningless phrase. Even the EU's own age-verification app doesn't make this mandatory.

Parents get a quest of their own: three documents just to set up an account for their kid — proof of their own age, proof of the child's age, and proof of custody. The infrastructure to verify any of this simply doesn't exist yet — but that doesn't seem to bother the bill's authors.

On top of that, a parental account would get to approve every new contact the child makes and limit app usage to one hour a day. We're talking about teenagers who already ride scooters and go on dates unsupervised — but apparently the internet is a bridge too far.

The CCC has already called the proposal the end of the anonymous internet, D64 calls it a threat to the right to participate in public life, and EDRi rightly points out: if a design is harmful for a 13-year-old, it won't magically become safe the day they turn 18. The document hasn't even been officially presented yet — and the seams are already splitting.

Source: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/eu-kids-act-eu-kommission-will-netz-mit-alterskontrollen-zupflastern/