Greece has become one of the first countries in Europe to write a social media age ban into law, barring children under 15 from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms starting January 1, 2027. The measure passed after a marathon parliamentary session lasting more than 16 hours, with only the ruling New Democracy party voting in favor while most of the opposition rejected or abstained from the bill. The law places Greece at the front of a wider European push to restrict minors' access to social platforms, a trend that is now colliding with questions about privacy, anonymity, and how age verification should actually work.
A strict rule with no loopholes
The legislation leaves little room for exceptions. Parental consent will not allow a child under 15 to open an account, and existing accounts created before the law takes effect will not be grandfathered in. Coverage is defined by function rather than brand name, which is why LinkedIn appears on the restricted list alongside the more obvious targets. Messaging apps, by contrast, remain outside the scope of the ban, reflecting a distinction regulators increasingly draw between communication tools and platforms built around public posting, algorithmic feeds, and engagement-driven design.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis framed the policy, first floated in April, as a response to mounting concern over anxiety, disrupted sleep, and the addictive mechanics built into many social platforms. He described it as a "difficult but necessary measure," acknowledging the political cost of restricting access to services that are deeply embedded in teenage social life.
How age will be checked
Enforcement responsibility falls on the platforms themselves, a pattern seen in nearly every jurisdiction attempting similar restrictions. When a service cannot confirm a user's age through existing means, it must display a QR code linked to Kids Wallet, a government-run verification app. The app communicates only a binary signal - over or under 15 - without disclosing exact age or any other personal data. Digital Governance Minister Dimitris Papastergiou has emphasized that no personal information about children is shared with platforms through this system.
Oversight will be split between domestic and European authorities. Greece's broadcasting council and data protection authority will monitor compliance generally, while the European Commission will handle the largest platforms under the Digital Services Act, the EU's framework for regulating online services and content moderation.
The privacy trade-off
Age verification systems inevitably raise a familiar tension: confirming that someone is old enough to use a service often requires collecting or checking identity-linked data, even when designers try to minimize what is shared. Twenty-five organizations warned in May that the practical effect could extend well beyond teenagers, potentially requiring every user in Greece to prove their age at some point, eroding the online anonymity that many adults rely on for unrelated reasons - from whistleblowing to simply avoiding being tracked across the internet.
That concern sits uneasily alongside separate government plans to limit anonymous social media profiles altogether, suggesting Greece views anonymity as a privilege tied to context rather than a default right. This is likely to renew interest in tools such as VPNs, which encrypt traffic and mask a device's location, though they do nothing to bypass identity checks built into an app itself. A VPN can obscure where someone connects from, but it cannot spoof an age-verification system that relies on document checks or dedicated government apps.
Part of a broader European pattern
Greece is not acting alone. Australia's under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, becoming the first national policy of its kind. France attempted a similar under-15 restriction, only to see it struck down by its Constitutional Council on free expression grounds. The United Kingdom plans its own under-16 ban from spring 2027, while explicitly ruling out restrictions on VPN use as an enforcement tool. Slovenia, Spain, and Austria are drafting comparable measures, and the European Union is developing a Kids Act that Greece has said it intends to align with. The result is a patchwork of national experiments testing how far governments can go in regulating platform access for minors - and how much privacy, for everyone else, they are willing to trade along the way.