Losing your kids to doom scrolling? Greece is building a government app for that

Greece announced plans to enhance parental oversight of mobile devices in 2025 through a government-operated app, that will help get digital age verification and browsing controls. Dimitris Papastergiou, the minister of Digital Governance, said the Kids Wallet app, due to launch in March, is aimed at safeguarding children under the age of 15 from the risks of excessive and inappropriate internet use. The app will be run by a widely used government services platform and operate in conjunction with an existing smartphone app for adults to carry digital identification documents. “It’s a big change,” Papastergiou told reporters, adding that the app would integrate advanced algorithms to monitor usage and apply strict authentication processes. “The Kids Wallet application will do two main things: It will make parental control much easier, and it will be our official national tool for verifying the age of users,” he said. A survey published in December 2024 by a Greek research organization KMOP found that 76.6% of children aged 9-12 have access to the internet via personal devices, 58.6% use social media daily, and 22.8% have encountered inappropriate content. Many lack awareness of basic safety tools, such as the block and report buttons, authors of the study said. Papastergiou said the government was hoping to have the children’s app pre-installed on smartphones sold in Greece by the end of 2025. While facing criticism from some digital rights and religious groups, government-controlled apps and online services—many introduced during the pandemic—are generally popular in Greece, as they are seen as a way of bypassing historically slow bureaucratic procedures. The planned online child protection measures would go further than regulations already in place in several European countries by introducing more direct government involvement. They will also help hold social media platforms more accountable for enforcing age controls, Papastergiou said. “When you have an (online) age check, you might have a 14-year-old claiming they are 18. Or you could have someone who actually is a genuine 20-year-old … Now we can address that,” he said. This article was provided by The Associated Press.