The European Commission is building an age-verification app that lets a user prove they are old enough for a platform without disclosing who they are, AP reported Monday from Brussels [1]. The app is the technical answer to a policy the Commission has not yet written down.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen supplied the political push the same day. A special EU panel on child safety, co-chaired by Maria Melchior and Jörg M. Fegert, handed her its report and urged that children under 13 be barred from social media until companies "demonstrate that their services are safe by design" [1]. Von der Leyen, a physician by training, went further: no screens at all before age 3, supervised and time-limited access under 13, and "phased and gradual access for different age ranges" above it [1].

That is where the report and the app part ways. The panel put "the burden of proof on providers, not regulators, parents and children" [1]. The anonymous app quietly moves part of that burden back onto every user, who must clear a gate before entering. Neither the accuracy of that gate nor its false-positive rate has been reported.

Nothing here is law. Von der Leyen said only that she and the Commission will "come up with a proposal" for the 27 member states to weigh [1]. Australia, Turkey and Indonesia have already passed under-16 or under-15 bans that critics call easy to evade [1]; the EU's own regulators accused Meta this year of failing to keep under-13s off Instagram. The unmeasured question is whether an anonymous credential works where a birthdate field did not.

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels