Riho TERRAS

Protection of minors online

Social media has many problems which affect young people in negative ways. While I theoretically agree that there should be some age limit, it is very difficult to enforce it in practice. If providing age is purely declarative, then children will simply lie about their age, which is the situation today when platforms’ terms of service impose an age limit. Using eID means to prove your age to a social media platform is disproportionate. eID means are intended mainly for proving your identity for serious tasks such as e-government services and private services which require a high degree of security, such as banking. It is theoretically possible under eIDAS to prove your age without revealing your identity, but there are no guarantees that social media will implement this and refrain from asking for more than they need. Many citizens will not understand these intricacies, they will believe that using the eID always equates to proving your identity and they do not want this for social media. This will reduce trust in eID and will hamper its uptake, which harms our digitalisation efforts. This is why I voted against this report. All measures to tackle this problem need to be proportional.