> France becomes first EU country to ban under-15s from social media

France has become the first country in the European Union to ban social media for children under 15.  Both chambers of parliament adopted the law on Tuesday. It will now roll out in two stages. Starting in September 2026, under-15s won’t be able to open new accounts, and in January 2027 the rule will extend to existing accounts. The ban in France follows Australia’s world-first under-16 ban and the UK’s planned ban, due in spring 2027. But France goes further in one way: to enforce the limit, everyone in France — not just teenagers — will have to prove their age to use platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Everyone in France will have to prove their age Even lawmakers who opposed the bill, from the left-wing France Unbowed party, warned it would end online anonymity and be impossible to enforce. The digital minister says personal data will be protected, but age verification at scale tells a different story. To verify ages, platforms often turn to biometric face scans, government ID uploads, and behavioral analysis, each forcing companies to collect more personal data than before. Biometric data is especially sensitive: Unlike a password, you can’t change your face if it leaks. When Discord rolled out UK age checks in 2025, a breach exposed 70,000 government-ID photos. France joins Australia and the UK, where a similar ban takes effect in spring 2027. The early evidence isn’t reassuring: Australia’s own regulator found 70% of under-16s still reach the platforms they’re barred from, using the same fake-age workarounds as before. See where age checks are becoming law Safety shouldn’t cost your privacy Parents are right to want guardrails, but the mechanism matters as much as the goal. Age verification normalizes the mass collection of biometric and identity data just to reach services that used to be open to everyone, and it shifts the burden of child safety onto data infrastructure that carries its own risks. It may not even work: Barring under-15s doesn’t touch the manipulative design and engagement-at-all-costs algorithms that make these platforms harmful in the first place. It protects platforms, not children. The lasting fix is to make the internet less harmful for everyone, not to make identity the price of entry. For families navigating this now, our guide to keeping kids safe online is a place to start. Protect your privacy with a VPN Age verification systems typically check your IP address to confirm location, which is part of how platforms would determine whether “everyone in France” needs to prove their age. A VPN masking your location wouldn’t remove the need to verify age on platforms that require it directly, but it does address the broader surveillance concern: It prevents network observers and your ISP from seeing which websites you visit, and can help avoid location-based tracking that compounds the identity data these systems already collect.