EU KIDS Act

Edited title from "EU KIDS Act: helping children navigate a safer online world", as the guidelines encourage removing moralizing.

This is the long-expected EU legislature to formalize age verification requirements generally on the internet. In my opinion (as an EU citizen) it is too wide reaching, with no exceptions for small services. In fact, the proposal explicitly includes small services:

At the same time, small and micro enterprises are not exempted from this Regulation, since they may equally provide harms to minors. It would undermine the objective of this proposal to exclude them from scope.

And only carves out exceptions for purely educational use and services operated by public authorities (naturally):

Exempted from scope because they are unlikely to pose harms to minors are not-for-profit online encyclopaedias, not-for-profit educational and scientific repositories, services and systems that are designed for purely educational purposes and operated within educational establishments or organisations, open-source software-developing and-sharing platforms, unless the platform itself constitutes an AI system in scope of this Regulation and Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, services and systems specifically developed and operated for the sole purpose of scientific research and development, and services and systems designed, developed and operated by public authorities and for exclusive use of said public authorities or on their behalf.

Online services and app stores will have to use tools to check users’ ages, while protecting their privacy. They can for example use the EU age verification app, which does not retain identity documents or biometric data.

These checks are either trivial to bypass or they don't actually preserve privacy.

Under 13: children will not be able to access social media services. They can still use child-friendly video-sharing services through an account managed by a parent or guardian.

So they are no longer allowed to read the political discourse which our representatives love to have on sites like Twittr? Does this mean they will start publishing these in a public location or will we raise a whole generation completely separated from public discourse?

access to social media will be based on age.

I get the idea, but the thresholds are guaranteed to be wrong, in both directions. I'd much prefer if they focused on making sure people are informed about problematic features, and making sure people can progressively opt-in, whether the account is adult-managed or not.

limiting features that can encourage excessive use, such as infinite scroll, reward tricks and push notifications during sleeping hours

Without a definition of "limiting", "encourage", and "excessive", it's hard to say much about this, except that I'd probably want those to apply to my adult account too.

prohibiting unsolicited contact from strangers

Using scare words. Having ways to block unwanted contact is good, but there's no way for an operator to determine who's a "stranger".

ensuring profiles for minors are private by default

offering easy ways to block or mute other users

AI chatbots and companions must also be turned off by default

All good suggestions, but should really be universal, not specific to children

[AI] will no longer be able to act in ways that make children emotionally dependent on them

Yeah, good luck with that.