The EU's draft Kids Act makes adults prove their age to switch off child-safe defaults

A parent opens a video app to set up a 14-year-old's account. Before the child gets anywhere, the parent is asked to prove that they are, in fact, the parent ^[7]. The teenager sits behind age verification as well, which the draft applies across the board through the EU's age verification scheme ^[6]. Techdirt, which opposes the draft, wrote: "If this sounds complex and like a compliance nightmare, that's because it is." ^[22]

The Commission presents the act as a continuation of the Digital Services Act ^[3]. The draft changes who a product team has to check. Techdirt argues the "risky" threshold covers virtually all mainstream social and video services ^[10]. It does give the draft some credit for proportionality, since the tiers stop short of a blanket ban, and it notes that a French court declared such undifferentiated bans unconstitutional last month ^[18][9].

Under this draft, the check guards the adult version of the product. Providers must generally make child-safe design the default, and they can relax it only after age assurance establishes that the user is an adult ^[15]. The defaults include rules on addictive features such as infinite scrolling ^[16]. So the adult who wants last year's product is the one asked for proof. Techdirt expects companies to check everyone: "most companies are well-advised to play it safe and use privacy-unfriendly age checks across their platforms," it wrote ^[13].

Under a headline saying the act won't keep the internet accountable ^[23], Techdirt makes its case on privacy and concentration. Age gates, it argues, create an infrastructure for control and entrench big tech's power ^[20]. It lists strong enforcement as one of the draft's four pillars without describing what that enforcement involves ^[21].

The first question for an operator is whether the service meets the risky threshold ^[4]. If it does, the age check is required. What is left to decide is how little the check collects, and whether current age signals clear the "high degree of confidence" bar that spares existing accounts ^[8]. If the service falls only under safety by design, as a game, chatbot or app store might ^[14], the second question is whether adult retention depends on the features the child-safe default removes. Test that with retention and usage depth among adults, with infinite scroll on and off, and ignore time-in-app.

For that second group, I'd recommend this: if adults stay without those features, give everyone the child-safe default and ask nobody for proof. A provider that runs no age assurance simply keeps the default for all users ^[1]. The cost is that adults lose features some of them chose, and every age group gets the same product. If adult retention does fall, the team is building age assurance and taking on the privacy cost Techdirt says the act imposes on all users ^[17].