- Five EU countries should test an age verification application to protect children online
- Denmark, Greece, Spain, France and Italy are the first to test this technical solution
- The United Kingdom applied compulsory age checks on Friday July 25, 2025, providing concerns for the digital rights of citizens
Five EU countries should test an age verification application to protect children online.
Denmark, Greece, Spain, France and Italy are the first to test the technical solution unveiled by the European Commission on July 14, 2025.
The announcement occurred less than two weeks before the United Kingdom, compulsory age verification checks on July 25. Until now, they have raised concerns about confidentiality and safety of British users, fueling a peak of use among the best VPN applications.
The EU Age Verification Plan
As the European Commission explains on its website, the age verification plan allows users to prove that they have more than 18 “without revealing any other personal information”.
“It is based on open-source technology and designed to be robust, friendly, preserving privacy and entirely interoperable with future European digital identity portfoli,” said the Commission.
The introduction of this technical solution is a key step in implementing children’s online safety rules under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The legislators ensure that this solution aims to define “a new reference for the protection of privacy” in age verification.
Indeed, online services will only receive proof that the user is 18 and over, without any personal contact details.
Additional work on the integration of zero knowledge evidence is also underway, the complete implementation of compulsory checks in the EU should be applied in 2026.
What’s going on in the United Kingdom?
From Friday, July 25, millions of British will have to be ready to prove their age before accessing certain websites or content.
Under the online security law, sites with adult content must prevent minors from accessing their services via robust age controls.
Social media, dating applications and game platforms should also check the age of their users before showing them a so-called harmful content.
As the British regulator organ, OFCOM explains on its website, service providers can use several methods to confirm the age of users. These extend facial analyzes to estimate the age of people at age checks of the bank card or credit card, identification portfolios, age checks of the mobile network operator, the correspondence of the photos, And even the estimate of age based on emails.
The imprecision of what constitutes harmful content, as well as the risks of confidentiality and security linked to some of these age verification methods, have aroused criticism among experts, politicians and citizens concerned with privacy who fear a negative impact on the digital rights of people.
Although the EU’s approach seems better on paper, it remains to be seen how the age verification scheme will ultimately be applied.
Commenting on this point, the CEO of the Swedish VPN supplier, Mullvad, told Techradar: “The EU [approach] is more planned, it took 12 years to the EU. In the United Kingdom resembles [there is] No plan at all. “”
