Recital 43

Guardians play an important role in the lives of minors, including in supporting their safe and informed navigation of the online environment. This is why guardians should be facilitated in providing such support through the availability of tools for guardians. Tools for guardians are software, features, functionalities, or applications designed to help guardians accompany their minor’s online activity, privacy, safety and well-being, while respecting children’s agency and privacy. Tools for guardians should be considered as complementing other safety by design measures but should never replace the providers’ own responsibility to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors. Since parental oversight is not always possible due to the realities of children’s living arrangements and since guardians might be absent or disengaged, compliance should not depend exclusively on guardians. Tools for guardians should at least include features for reporting content on behalf of their child, setting screen time limits, seeing and being informed on the accounts that the minor communicates with, managing account settings, as well as other features to supervise uses of the services in scope of this Regulation that may be detrimental to the minor’s privacy, safety and security. Such features may include warnings for guardians to be informed about potential repeated searches of minors related to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders or initiate contact with or became friends with, including where such accounts belong to adults an adult. Where guardians manage minor’s settings, they should be able to choose the time period for which they intend to change such settings. These tools should be tailored to the age of the minor, taking due account of their gradual development. Tools for guardians should be age-appropriate, easy to access and activate, effective and not easily circumvented, while respecting minors’ rights to privacy, access to information and growing autonomy in accordance with their evolving capacities. For example, such tools should allow the guardian to use the tool without creating an account with the service and they should ensure that changes can only be made with the same degree of authorisation required for the initial activation of the tools. Minors should be clearly notified when such tools are activated and should, in particular where monitoring functionalities are used, receive a clear real-time indication. For very large online platforms within the meaning of Article 33(1) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, interoperability with third-party guardian tools should further enhance usability and effectiveness, in accordance with conditions set out by Article 6 of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925. The power to adopt acts in accordance with Article 290 TFUE should be delegated to the Commission in order to supplement this Regulation by laying down the necessary rules and technical criteria for the tools for guardians.