Topic
Laws, regulations and technical schemes requiring online services to assure or estimate a user's age.
Social media bans for minors, weighed or in force in more than 20 countries, may not improve mental health, a digital media researcher argues on Phys.org. It sets the bans beside more than $17 billion in settlements and payouts by YouTube and Meta since March.
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Aylo is restoring Pornhub in Australia for users who pass Apple's iOS age checks, having blocked the country in March over rules backed by $49.5m fines. Australia's codes still place the duty to verify on the website, even though Apple now runs the check.
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WhatsApp extended its parent-managed controls to teen accounts, letting parents move Meta AI from its 13+ default to a stricter Limited Content mode. The controls are optional, so the tighter limits apply only in families that turn them on.
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Culture secretary Lisa Nandy says the UK's under-16 social media ban, due in March, is only a staging post toward a more interventionist state. Platforms preparing for that deadline are building for a first tranche, with more promised by the minister now in charge.
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EU Commission's draft Kids Act bars social media accounts for under-13s and locks the unrestricted version of covered apps behind an age check. Techdirt argues platforms will play it safe and check everyone, so adults carry the privacy cost too.
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Qustodio says Australian teens were back online at pre-ban levels within months of the under-16 social media ban, largely via false ages and VPNs. Meta's teen limits, New York City's classroom AI ban and any workplace AI rule written for company devices face the same test.
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Musical.ly paid $5.7mn in 2019 over the same statute. The DOJ's complaint treats registration-flow design as the violation, which makes age-gating a documented enforcement target.
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Meta limits its Muse AI agent to users 18 and over while selling it through Jolly, a dress-up mascot, and a planned Tamagotchi-style device. Fairplay says the character appeals to preschoolers, and Meta answers with extra age checks it has not described.
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Default 2-hour caps, a midnight-to-6am block and age assurance are now written down, with a contingent payment attached to Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopting the same defaults.
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The deal binds only Meta, yet it puts hard numbers on age signals, notification defaults and overnight lockouts, and Meta collects about $5.3 billion less if TikTok and YouTube decline to match them.
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A judge signed off on the payout, but the enforceable part is a list of product defaults only a parent can undo. Meta's rivals had the terms written for them.
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Every company that outsourced KYC document capture now owns an exposure it never inventoried, because the images being sold appear to come from the verifier rather than from any of its customers. The FBI opened the file in New Orleans.
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Lisa Nandy told MPs that the two firms' proposals do not meet the scale of the crisis. The draft law would also reach providers of apps used by children, turning on-device image classification into a compliance job for them too.
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One in five Australian under-16s still used TikTok and Snapchat after 4.7 million accounts were restricted, according to a parental-control firm. Other governments are copying the approach with no evidence yet that it makes children safer.
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California's under-16 feed ban starts on January 1, 2027, and the cheapest way to comply is an age signal built from a birth date the user typed at device setup. The EFF expects platforms to verify every adult instead.
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The EU Kids Act would bar under-15s from social media and AI chat services, while the age-verification wallet the Commission finished in April certifies 18 and can be adapted to 13. Member states are meant to be tooled by the end of 2026.
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Von der Leyen announced a ban on social media for under-13s and one-hour parent-run accounts for 13- to 15-year-olds. WIRED and a draft seen by the Financial Times describe the youngest tier differently, and the text is years from force.
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Discord's teen-by-default model is already enforced where local law requires it, and the global rollout is held to the second half of 2026. The route a user picks at the prompt decides whether a government ID leaves the device.
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Techdirt reports that the deal embeds age gating across Meta's products and puts under-18 accounts on a daily clock with default content filters, and says TikTok and YouTube will be pressed to match it.
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Australia's online watchdog reported that more than 80% of children were still on a restricted platform, and the UK is due to switch on its own under-16 ban in spring 2027 with Wellcome-funded teams following tens of thousands of teenagers.
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Security · September 17, 2026 · Confirmed4 publishers