TikTok agrees to re-verify age of users in Italy

The Italian watchdog added that it will be monitoring the effectiveness of TikTok’s age verification process

TikTok has agreed to re-verify the age of every user in Italy and block access to users who state they are younger than 13, the country’s data protection agency said today.

The video-sharing social network confirmed that from February 9 every user in Italy will be required to go through its age gate process again — and only those users aged 13 and older will be allowed to continue using the app.

Accounts of those who say they are younger than 13 will be deleted.

The move to require all users in Italy to go through TikTok’s age-verification process again follows an emergency order by Italy’s GPDP on January 22 after the death of a 10-year-old girl from Palermo.

TikTok was given a deadline of January 29 to respond to the GPDP’s order, as reported earlier. Today the agency confirmed the measures TikTok has agreed to take.

As well as asking all users in the country to re-enter their date of birth to continue using the app, the GPDP said TikTok will “consider deploying AI-based systems for age verification purposes”.

The Italian watchdog added that it will be monitoring the effectiveness of TikTok’s age verification process.

The basic age-check TikTok conducts when users sign up — which it will be pushing out again to all users in Italy in a few days — simply requires users to enter a date of birth, so is very easy to circumvent. But it’s also clear that age verification online remains a hard problem.

Robust identity checks to determine age beyond doubt threaten a “sledgehammer to crack a nut” scenario — potentially limiting service access in a way that’s unfair and risking harm to online anonymity and privacy, with potential knock-on impacts on other considerations like freedom of expression and data security.