Greece’s Kids Wallet for age assurance gets parental consent to access civil registry

Greece is introducing an age assurance app called Kids Wallet to help combat online addiction among minors – the latest entry in a growing list of age assurance tools being rolled out globally.

According to Euractiv, the wallet app will use the Greek digital ID of a parent or guardian, validated by TaxisNet, the country’s national authorization service. In this way, parents can use their digital ID app to request age assurance to validate the child’s identity using date of birth data from the Greek civil registry. The government says third-party applications could retrieve the child’s age via API with parental consent.

Per the report, a parent could select which apps their child could use, set time limits and block specific apps.

The Kids Wallet app, set to be available to Greek citizens within a month, is yet another entry into the age assurance arena. It’s a space that’s fast becoming crowded, as the EU moves toward its 2026 deadline for member nations to provide digital identity wallets to citizens, under the EUDI Wallet program and the eIDAS 2.0 regulation.

Individual nation states are pursuing wallets, and large private companies also have wallet products available – notably, Apple, Google and Samsung. Each brings its own view on age assurance methods. Meta, meanwhile, is waging a campaign of litigation to try and avoid having to impose age assurance measures on its apps Facebook and Instagram, pushing app stores to take the weight.

Per Euractiv, an EU-wide age verification app is expected to be rolled out soon. Greece’s regulatory moves are in keeping with the European Commission’s wider efforts to protect minors – but its government, too, says the current approach is “a patchwork of different EU regulations.” For Greece’s part, it wants a “digital majority age” of 15, under which users would need parental consent to access social media, and mandatory built-in parental control software on all devices with internet access sold in the EU.

Regardless of the confusion on the implementation level, Eurativ notes that “there seems to be a consensus between lawmakers and online platforms that the era of self-declaration of age is dead and ineffective.”

Greek digital governance minister heads to Brussels to make his case

One of Greece’s biggest champions of online protections for kids is Digital Governance Minister Dimitris Papastergiou, who this week is in Brussels, presenting Greece’s National Strategy and its Kids Wallet app to European counterparts.

A statement from Papastergiou to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) says “the protection of minors from addiction to the internet and taking action on this issue on a European level are key priorities. Our main digital tool in this direction is the Kids Wallet app, which we are activating within the spring and which will be useful as a means of parental control but also for verifying the age of users.”

Papastergiou is calling for broader cooperation among European states and digital content platforms. “Only by working together can we achieve these targets and help parents and children manage the time, duration and content they watch.”

mately, changes in the law regarding the right to erasure, fair and reasonable testing, direct right of action and removal of small-business exemptions could address key gaps in the 1988 Privacy Act.

Article Topics

age verification  |  children  |  digital ID  |  digital wallet  |  European Commission  |  Greece  |  Kids Wallet