The Commission’s approach to age assurance: Do the DSA Guidelines on protecting minors online strike the right balance? - DSA Observatory

By Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon, (Brussels Privacy Hub, LSTS, VUB) The European Commission’s guidelines on protecting minors online take important steps toward building a comprehensive list of relevant service design and organizational measures that are relevant under Article 28(1) DSA. But in doing so, they also risk oversimplifying a complex regulatory trade-off that underlies the deployment of age assurance methods. This blog post argues that the guidelines overstate the proportionality of age verification and age estimation methods, sideline key data protection concerns, and miss the opportunity to articulate the implications of a rights-based, privacy-preserving design for all users.