Social networks like Facebook and Snapchat face challenge of getting parental consent for under-16 users in EU after new rules go into effect 2018
Duncan Robinson / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
The December 2015 EU privacy rules made parental consent mandatory for under-16 social media users, with member states given two years to pass national laws — putting the compliance burden squarely on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat before the rules go live in 2018.
This story is the hinge of a decade-long arc: what began as a consent requirement hardened into enforcement, with Snapchat dropping precise location history for European under-16s in 2018 to avoid consent collection, and by 2026 European countries moving toward outright social media bans for children while the Commission opened a DSA probe into Snap's age-assessment practices.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Snapchat must either build working parental-consent flows across every EU member state's national implementation or lose their under-16 user bases when the rules take effect in 2018.
Second-order effects
- Snapchat's 2018 answer — deleting precise location history for European teens rather than verifying parents — shows platforms will strip data features to shrink their consent surface instead of building verification infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If consent-based age gates keep proving unenforceable, the policy endpoint is prohibition: Europe's shift toward child bans and the Commission's DSA investigation into Snap's age checks suggest regulators now treat self-reported ages as a design failure, not a compliance gap.
The trend: EU child-protection policy is escalating from parental-consent requirements to enforced age assurance and outright bans, with each enforcement failure tightening the next round of regulation.