MeitY asks social media platforms to devise methods for age verification of children

The meeting with social media platforms was held at the office of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in New Delhi on July 18

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on July 18 told significant social media platforms that the government will not prescribe any method to the industry for verifying the age of children and obtaining relevant parental consent.

Instead, the government said that such platforms could explore their own, tech-enabled methods to ensure that a child's age is verified as per the provisions of the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, multiple sources aware of the matter told Moneycontrol.

This was conveyed to the industry in a meeting held at the IT ministry on July 18 morning. The meeting came in the context of the ministry being unable to zero in on a single, full-proof method for verifying children's age. The ministry had earlier explored leveraging Aadhaar or Digilocker for the same. However, the methods were found to be unfeasible, sources said.

The meeting was chaired by MeitY secretary S Krishnan, and attended by additional secretaries Bhuvnesh Kumar and Amit Agarwal, Cyber Laws group coordinator Deepak Goel and others. From the side of the industry, the meeting was attended by Meta, Google, Sharechat and Snap, sources said.

The DPDP Act defines a child as someone below the age of 18 and Section 9 of the Act mandates that such children have to be verified and parental consent will be required before processing the data of a minor. The law also puts a bar on tracking children behavioural monitoring or targeted advertising at children.

What happened in the meeting

During the meeting, MeitY told the industry that they don't want to be "prescriptive in rulemaking", and ipso facto, the government was "going  to refrain from prescribing any mechanism" under Sec (9) (1) of the DPDP Act, a person familiar to the developments said.

While recommending that the industry come up with its own solutions for this issue, another person aware of the meeting said that the MeitY officials alluded to Sec (8)(4)  of the DPDP Act. That provision says that platforms should implement "appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure effective observance of the provisions of this Act and the rules."

A third source said that the government was also encouraging the attendees to bring forward a solution which can be equally applicable to all, across industries, and which facilitates ease of doing business.

However, there was a consensus between the industry and the government that in the long run, a more commercial option would implement these checks at the app store and device levels (as opposed to the app level, which is currently being considered for now).

Behavioural tracking

During the meeting, there was also a discussion on the restrictions on behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising of children. The industry conveyed to the government that such tracking are often taken up by platforms to ensure online safety, ensuring beneficial personalisation and so on.

Although no future meeting has been finalised for now, the ministry has asked the platforms to send in their possible solutions for verifying children's age, multiple sources said.

Moneycontrol has reached out to MeitY, Meta, Google, Snap and Sharechat with queries in this regard. The article will be updated when a response is received.