France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

The court reasoned sensibly: it's wrong to violate the rights of all citizens just to weed out a small group of violators. This is contrary to data protection regulations. The controversial Chat Control law follows the same logic: to find criminals, they propose monitoring everyone.

The problem is that any age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system. And such tools rarely remain "just for kids"—they quickly become used for other purposes. The only secure way is to verify not the person's identity, but the device's status (for example, that it's a children's device). This is called age assurance: we confirm age without knowing who exactly is in front of us.

This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.

Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.

The title is unfortunately edited. The courts have blocked it. The government wants it.

As french citizen what I can say is: Parliamentary time wasted. During the initial work the deputees that have initiated the project could have figured out that the constitutional court would, in fine, block the text.

What I find interesting is that Texas did it with just pornography sites, everyone complains. Then California, which included those that complained by Texas' law, says they're going to do it at the OS level, some people were okay with it but some still opposed it and possibly some others opposed it. Yet, they're still pushing forward with both?

Seems like there are many ways to get toward the best of both worlds -- don't allow people to upload pictures of kids who are clearly under 15 to social media would get us a lot of the way there.

Also all of these companies know from advertising data, and location data, that you are at school, who you are, etc. They would also know that all of your friends are also teenagers.

If the law is serious there are many many ways to enforce this without violating privacy.

Oh that’s interesting. Could that potentially be used as a blocker for Chat Control 2.0 at the European level?

I love how the french can go from bieng, from bieng, French, to making complete rational sensical descions that they will then stick to but refuse to discuss. Bravo vive la france!

It is unclear to me how you can regulate any digital service with respect to any demographic identity without regression to full identity check.

Parental controls are not a solution, either. People are free to use anyhow terminally they wish. If you wanted to change that then it again regresses to the same issue.

This is the correct response. Privacy is a human right.

Frankly, the proper solution is to ban social media regardless of age. We are already doing it with heroin and other similar substances and clearly social media are pretty bad for everyone and anyone.