The UK ICO fines Reddit £14.47M for unlawfully using children's personal information; Reddit began verifying user ages in July 2025 to comply with the UK OSA
BBCTom Singleton
Context & Ripple Effects
The enforcement follows the ICO's earlier scrutiny of how Reddit and Imgur establish users' ages, while Reddit later introduced UK age checks for mature content under the Online Safety Act. It puts privacy-law exposure alongside platform safety obligations rather than treating age assurance as a content-policy issue alone.
The case also sits beside the ICO's prior action against TikTok over under-13 users' data. Subsequent calls from the ICO and Ofcom for highly effective checks to prevent under-13 accounts indicate that regulators are converging on more demanding proof of age.
First-order effects
Reddit faces a £14.47M penalty and heightened scrutiny of the personal-data practices connected to child users in the UK.
Its existing age-verification rollout becomes a more consequential compliance control, with both its effectiveness and data handling implicated by the wider regulatory focus.
Second-order effects
Platforms already under ICO scrutiny, including TikTok and Imgur, face stronger incentives to review how their age-assurance systems collect and use minors' data, not merely whether they restrict access.
Age-check providers and platform product teams will need to meet two linked demands: reliably distinguish younger users while minimizing the personal data retained in doing so.
If enforcement continues across major platforms, age verification may become a durable operating requirement for UK-facing social services, with regulatory expectations shaping system design rather than only moderation rules.
The trend: Child-safety regulation is increasingly making age assurance a combined access-control and data-governance requirement for online platforms.
By passing these send-all-apps-your-private-data laws, politicians are breaking everyone's fundamental right to privacy, and are setting up parents and kids for a disaster as the weakest-link apps and vendors continue to leak everyone's data out.
Vendors like Epic's Kids Web Services help developers achieve compliance with as minimally invasive verification practices as possible. But the market is also filled with shady surveillance-oriented firms and novice app developers doing it themselves. https://www.kidswebservices.…
Apple is the only company with a great proposal here: let parents, who buy the devices used by kids, set up kids accounts and decide what they're allowed to do, then pass those decisions to apps through parental controls — without demanding anyone's identity papers.
We're not the EU with a massive market. At some point these platforms will decide the cost & effort of compliance + fines is not worth the audience/revenue and just geoblock us