Recital 30

Minors should be protected from contact-related risks, including cyberbullying, harassment, and those seeking to groom, sexually abuse or extort minors, human traffickers and those seeking to recruit minors into criminal gangs or promote violence, radicalisation, violent extremism and terrorism, as perpetrators often use the digital space to reach out to children. Consequently, interactions between minors and unregistered recipients of the service, as well as unknown recipients of service, especially adults, should have robust safeguards. Providers of online social networking services and video-sharing platform services should ensure that information about the minor, such as profile information, biography, activities, list of friends, followers and similar information cannot be accessed by recipients of the service by default, and in any event, by recipients of the service without accounts. Minors should be empowered to exercise effective control over the visibility of their personal information, such as their profile photo, profile information, content shared, contacts, activities and history or any other data shared on the account or profile. Contact details from minors – including but not limited to address, email address and telephone number – should not be shared with other recipients of the service. Minors should be able to block any other recipient of the service, manage content shared and regulate the interaction and related metrics, such as likes and number of followers. By default, the hosting of livestreams or other real-time transmissions should be disabled, as should access to the minor’s account information by recipients of the service who have not been explicitly accepted. To ensure that the possibility to enable these settings remains proportionate, this should depend on the age and evolving capacities of the minor, for example by ensuring that public accounts and the possibility to host livestream should only be accessible to children above the minimum age and if explicitly consented by their guardian.