The entire tech world must now adopt the EU’s COVID ID system to verify users’ ages, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said.
Speaking at an EU conference billed as pushing for online child safety, the senior Eurocrat lambasted technology firms for allegedly looking to “profit from children’s vulnerability”.
Such actions, she continued, justified the union’s efforts to censor the internet, with her decision to repurpose the EU’s system of digital COVID passes part of this ongoing process.
According to von der Leyen, the COVID pass system — which she claims is now open source — allows tech companies to definitively verify the ages of their users, arguing this leaves no more room for opposition to the bloc’s online edicts.
“It is built on the success of our European COVID App; you might recall that one. That App was used in 78 countries on 4 continents, so it is a proven and reliable model,” she said, adding that member states will soon roll the product out as part of their digital ID systems.
“We have made the technology open source, so online platforms can easily adopt it. In other words, no more excuses – the technology for age verification is available.”
Von der Leyen also reiterated her calls for children to be banned from all social media platforms, insisting that the bloc would be pushing through the change over the summer.
“The question is not whether young people should have access to social media, the question is whether social media should have access to young people,” she said.
Von der Leyen’s claims that the EU’s reworked COVID pass system is safe and sufficiently open for public adoption have been called into question in recent days.
Security experts have claimed that the system is extremely easy to hack into, leaving anyone who signs up for the digital ID system at risk.
Others questioned the validity of von der Leyen’s open source claim, saying that the program’s heavy reliance on closed products owned by Apple and Google renders it not fit for purpose.