Social media identity verification: Macron eyes ID scanning

In Australia, a law banned kids aged twelve to fifteen from social media. But two out of every three of those kids kept scrolling anyway. They used family accounts and V.P.N.s to walk right around the ban.

That's the template France's president is now

That's the template France's president is now trying to copy across an entire continent. And if you've got a kid with a phone, or you're a kid with a phone, this one lands in your house. According to reporting from Biometric Update, President Macron is pushing the European Union to set one social media age rule for all twenty-seven member countries. He's doing it because his own country blocked him. France's Constitutional Court struck down the national version back in August. The judges read it as a violation of free speech. So the question threading through all of this, can you actually keep a kid off Instagram, and what does it cost the rest of us to try?

Start with that Australian number, because it's the whole story in miniature. Researchers found roughly two-thirds of the banned kids still had access. A ban on paper doesn't mean a ban in practice. A twelve-year-old with a borrowed login beats the law every time. For regulators, that's an enforcement nightmare. For parents, it means the fix you were promised might not be a fix at all.

Now here's the tension nobody expected. To prove a kid's age, a platform needs to check something. But the E.U.'s own privacy rules say you can't scan people's I.D. documents. You can't collect their face data either. Instead, the guidance points to something called a zero-knowledge proof. That's a clever bit of math that confirms you're over a certain age without revealing who you are or handing over your birthday. Sounds perfect. The catch, it's brand-new technology, hard to build, and hard to check at scale. The more private you make it, the harder it is to audit. That trade-off is going to shape what shows up on your phone.

Then there's the scale of what Macron's really asking. One country's rules, a big platform can ignore or work around. Twenty-seven countries speaking with one voice, that can't be dodged. When the whole bloc agrees, companies stop building a separate French product or a separate German one. They build one version for everyone. Which means a rule written in Brussels quietly becomes the rule for your feed, wherever you live.