EFF: Digital Services Act Guidelines Protecting Minors Risk Social Media Bans
European Commission guidelines for protecting minors under the Digital Services Act (DSA) are a "major step" toward social media bans that will undermine individuals' rights, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) said Monday.
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The guidelines, among other things, lay out how platforms should check users' ages and recommend age verification for platforms that pose high risks to minors' safety (see 2507140013).
Under the DSA, platforms must ensure a high level of safety, privacy and security for minors, and they're barred from targeting young people with personalized ads, EFF noted. Yet that seems to require platforms know their users' age, it said.
The DSA acknowledges an inherent tension between ensuring a minor’s privacy and requiring platforms to know users' ages, EFF said. Rather than resolve that tension, however, the act says that service providers shouldn't be incentivized to collect the age of their users, and it makes a point of not mandating platforms to collect additional data to assess whether a user is underage.
The question of age checks, therefore, is critical to understanding the obligations of platforms to safeguard minors online, EFF said, but, it added, that all methods for performing age checks come with "serious drawbacks."
The EC's original draft guidelines viewed age checks as a tool to determine people's ages in order to tailor their online experiences according to age, EFF said. However, the final version goes "far beyond that" and "seems to consider measures restricting access based on age as an effective means to ensure a high level" of protection for minors on platforms.
"This is a surprising turn" since many in Brussels considered social media bans disproportionate, EFF said. Now, the EC considers access restrictions appropriate where EU or national law sets a minimum age to access certain products or services, opening the door to different national age-limit laws for social media platforms.
Such bans won't make the internet safer for children, but will let platforms off the hook, EFF said. "If it is enough for platforms like Instagram and TikTok to implement (comparatively cheap) age restriction tools, there are no incentives anymore to actually make their products and features safer for young people."
EFF submitted feedback to the Commission’s consultation on the guidelines, emphasizing that young peoples' online safety "must include privacy and security ... and must not come at the expense of freedom of expression and equitable access to digital spaces."