Introduction

The European Union government is giving a year to implement age verification to Internet sites and apps to prevent minors to access any online content that could be considered harmful to them.  While everyone would agree with protecting kids, and some content that can be easily found is absolutely not for children, there are many issues that should be addressed before continuing with this. Also it should be parent's task withing their possibilities, so more investment in education with that would be a good starting point to avoid these and other problems related with youth digital addiction. The links below contain the full information.

https://avn.com/news/legal/eu-gives-platforms-12-months-to-deploy-strict-age-verification-179936

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-presents-guidelines-and-age-verification-app-prototype-safer-online-space-children

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1820

As we can see it will most likely be an app or a service that will somehow share personal data, maybe it's just the birth date but we can't be sure. Also this comes right after the evident censorship pushed by payment processor services and UK's poorly performed age restriction law application with this same subject.

The issues

There are many things to consider keeping this in mind, while the following could be evident cons, they won't be all of them:

• We've already seen how UK's age verification is working right now, and it's not affecting only nsfw sites, but also Discord servers or sites related with psychological problems. Keep in mind that in a time where remote work is taking more relevance, Discord is an essential work tool and not just communities. Even X is being affected for Europe when that should only apply to UK. 

• Most of the sites aren't big companies but free or fan sites that can't afford the expensive prices of the services from third companies dedicated to provide age verification that are actually making profit with this.
• There's actually no guarantee that privacy will be kept with those third party services unless they destroy all data related with the process, which violates Privacy Data laws from European Union, and we can't be 100% sure it's being actually destroyed.
• Potential higher risk of more personal data being stolen after being hacked. And with more data the risk of being hacked increases itself. We have also no guarantee that this data won't be at the dark web by a security risk or an individual making profit with that.
• If the filters are not set properly several sites and apps might be affected by mistake, like already seems to be happening in UK. And that includes nsfw artists or even sfw artists or cosplayers like the ones being already affected in X. 

• If a public free API is not provided to every app and site requiring age verification they could use fraudulent services, being a risk to both those sites and European users. 
• Different countries have different laws to protect personal data and this might be against them.

What we demand

Considering everything stated above, while on the paper there are some steps in an hipotetical good direction (considering how negative the whole censoring idea is) according to the first article, it is unclear if the relevant data will be the dating birth, face recognition or even credit card data.

Therefore, as EU citizens we demand on a first attempt to stop this censorship and focus at other solutions. Preventing and extreme control doesn't help. Actually it's just the opposite. But being realistic it is unlikely it will happen, so here's what we demand to ensure it will be harmless and keeping our privacy for personal data:

• A free government app or token as stated seems to be the lowest pain to everyone, however that should use our already digital certificate or ID card information but only to get the access token at the first time.
• A unique common process and system to all countries requiring it with no conflict with individual country laws to protect personal data or any other. 
• No personal data should be saved either at the device nor any server.  Transparency with everything.
• Another solution could be simply a parental control option at the devices involved allowing access or not. That seems to be a good option since no personal data is used except a secured pin.
• A free easy to use API so all sites and apps affected can implement anything they can, in case they need to do anything. A cookie able to be tracked from the site and the keeping the work to the device or browser could work too. 

Basically what we European Union citizens want is to make sure that no personal information like face, address or credit card (not limited to these ones) will be used or kept for tracking data or anything else unrelated with the main age verification use, and of course we don't want this to turn it to be something to make profit (even more) and specially at the cost of the sites, apps and artists affected because that could be unaffordable to the small ones.

 All user names have been removed from pictures to keep their privacy.

Thanks for your time