EU's Kids Act turns parents into ID checkers for Big Tech
Surveillance control · 17.09.2026

The EU has figured out how to protect children online: turn parents into IT admins, lawyers, and document couriers for Google and ByteDance all at once. Meet the Kids Act.

The plan's essence: kids under 13 are banned from YouTube, Instagram, and Fortnite; under 15, only stripped-down options are allowed. Sounds caring. In practice, it's a new bureaucratic quest for parents that solves nothing.

The author, a father of two, describes his current daily routine: hours spent configuring access permissions, disabling notifications, manually unblocking websites, and rationing screen time. He calls this the "Family-Tech-Cycle" — a process with no end. The Kids Act doesn't ease this; it piles on top of it. Now a parent will have to prove they're actually a parent — submitting proof of custody just to set up a monitored account for their child. That data will, of course, fly straight to the same corporations famous for hoarding everything that can be monetized.

Next comes a dystopian-style choice: either the child scans their face for "age estimation" and hands over biometric data to who-knows-whom, or the family uploads passport information. The Commission offers a "Mini-Wallet" app — supposedly data-light, but, as the author writes, it's "one update away from a privacy nightmare."

And all this works, to put it mildly, not very well: in Australia, similar age-verification systems have been cheerfully bypassed by anyone who wants to since the start of the year.

The central paradox: rules for safe design — no endless addictive feeds, no manipulative push notifications — are being proposed only for children. Yet they're obviously needed by everyone. Instead, the Commission is building an infrastructure of universal passport-based age verification — something, as the author notes, authoritarian governments can only dream of. And in the process, it risks cutting off from the internet anyone who simply lacks the right documents or technical means to pass verification.

Anonymity and free access to information aren't luxuries — they're the condition that lets abuse survivors, queer people, and whistleblowers use the internet without drawing attention. That's what's at stake right now.

Source: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/eu-kids-act-dieses-gesetz-macht-es-fuer-eltern-nicht-besser-sondern-schlimmer/