Parliament definitively approved this Thursday the obligation for social networks to verify the age of their users and obtain parental consent when they are under 15 years of age, through a final vote by the Senate.
But to put this obligation into practice, it remains to find this means, having to respect both the European regulations on personal data (RGPD) and the imperative of protection of minors.
No solution considered satisfactory
It has also been the subject of a legal battle for more than a year between the media regulator, Arcom, and the publishers of porn sites, which are required by law to prevent minors from accessing their content. The audiovisual and digital regulatory authority must define the technical contours of this system, but currently no solution is completely satisfactory.
The use of identity documents is “unreliable” due to the risk of identity theft and “not respectful of personal data”, according to the Cnil, guardian of French privacy. Not to mention the criticism from defenders of the right to anonymity on the Internet.
The government had launched experimentation in March with an age verification solution called “double anonymity” that allows minors to be blocked from accessing pornographic sites, without any evaluation since then.
The CNIL wants this solution, which is based on a trusted third party. But the latter recently recalled that he “considers acceptable” in the meantime the use of age validation via payment card (with a transaction of zero euros) or age estimation processes based on the analysis of facial features. .
Easily Bypassed Tools
A recent law also encourages the use of parental control on smartphones, by requiring manufacturers to offer activation of this tool when a terminal is launched for the first time. But parents don’t necessarily master it, and children can easily circumvent it.
Les tentatives d’imposer le contrôle de l’âge sur internet ont fait émerger dans le monde une petite industrie, qui s’est pour l’instant surtout développée sur les marchés des sites de vente d’alcool, de tabac ou de jeux d’ ‘money.
The EUConsent consortium, born from a European Commission tender, aims in particular to make the different actors interoperable so that they can exchange the controls already carried out. According to Avpa, which brings together providers of age verification solutions, this market could come to represent close to 4,000 million euros in the European Union.
Source: BFM TV
