Age check, the main obstacle to preventing minors from accessing social media

The Spanish Government will ban children under the age of 16 from accessing social networks, but is there a reliable method of checking the age of account creation and access to platforms? This is the key to safe access to digital environments .

The President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced this measure on Tuesday as part of a series of initiatives to increase control over digital platforms, thus joining other countries that have passed\u00A0laws along the same lines, such as Australia, France, New Zealand and Malaysia.

But it is essential to find a reliable system because the biometric facial analysis, the credit card number or the ID do not convince you of the risks of protecting sensitive data. The Spanish Government has optedfor its own tool, presented by the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Service in July 2024: the mobile app Beta Digital Portfolio, with which it participates in a pilot project by the European Commission.

Legislative amendment to impose prohibition

The spokeswoman for the Spanish Government, Elma Saiz, reported this Tuesday after the Council of Ministers on the legislative change to impose the ban: "Spain has taken a step forward internationally, and we will join five other European countries to do so, and we will hold our first meeting in the coming days."

As this meeting remains unspecified, it should be recalled that Spain was selected by the European Commission to lead a pilot project for the development of a common European basis for age verification, considering it to be its most technically advanced instrument.

Spain participates with its application, the Beta Digital Portfolio, based on the future European Digital Identity Portfolio. This tool allows the age of majority to be verified anonymously and without disclosure of personal data, ensuring privacy. Credentials expire every 30 days between applications to avoid user traceability.

Adaptation to European legislation

The European Commission welcomed Spain's announcement on Tuesday, but pointed out that national legislation cannot impose on platforms the 'additional obligations' provided for in the European Union's digital services law (DSA).

In fact, according to this European body, the use of the application being tested in the pilot programme involving Spain, France, Denmark, Italy and Greece cannot be mandatory if the platforms have effective age verification systems.

What are the verification methods?

"It is a problem that we have had since the Internet was created and that can now be done with very specific measures that are not cheap if we want to ensure the privacy of our citizens," explains Paloma Llaneza, a lawyer, system auditor, security consultant and expert at Razona Legaltech, as collected by the scientific resources platform for journalists at the Science Media Centre (SMC) in Spain.

The digital identity expert  specifies that the credit card is one of the verification options, but that a minor can always use that of his or her parents without permission, which also means that he or she transfers some data to a company that does not know his or her security measures.

Another option is "biometric recognition" . And it goes on to say that this mechanism would protect minors at the expense of all large corporations having scanned the faces of all users. In fact, although it specifies, only certain points of the face are scanned that are cryptographically stored, but once that information is stored, it can be known anywhere in the world.

"Even if you don't keep the photo, you keep the data you need to get to know it again," he said.

The third option is to scan the National Identity Document, but "the Data Protection Agency has made it clear that scanning or photocopying the ID, as they were doing in hotels, is excessive."

"In other words, we need to find age verification systems, but with due anonymity, "said the expert. He mentioned the European Digital Identity Portfolio (EUDI Wallet), which uses' Zero Knowledge Proof 'technology.

This technology, which uses cryptographic algorithms, is used first by a third party (an official agency like the Administration) to verify the information and then create a QR code.