Accelerator

Online Child Safety

Enabling online child safety with convenient, high-assurance, and anonymous age and relationship verification, parental consent and controls, and AI safety monitoring.

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2024

Since

Child Safety

Vertical

Opportunity

The Initiative

Online platforms are legally required to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors — but every current approach fails on privacy, usability, or both. The Online Child Safety Initiative builds the infrastructure to solve this: anonymous age verification, privacy-preserving parental consent, and AI safety monitoring — without creating surveillance systems or collecting new personal data.

Challenge

The Online Child Safety Challenge

Lawmakers across the United States and around the world have enacted — or are actively advancing — a wave of online child safety laws that require online service providers to verify users’ ages and, in the case of minors, obtain verifiable parental consent.

These laws apply broadly across digital platforms, including social media (in 45 U.S. states and at the federal level, such as the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act), app stores (in 11 states & federally, including the Utah App Store Accountability Act), and adult websites (in 24 states and federally, such as the Utah Online Pornography Viewing Age Requirements Act).

The Achilles’ heel of such laws — and the challenge for the online providers they cover — lies in the limitations of current mechanisms for verifying identity, age, and parental consent. All of these suffer from a variety of flaws — including being inconvenient, error-prone, costly to implement, and posing significant risks to privacy, security, usability, and compliance.

As a result, despite broad bipartisan support (the Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate by a vote of 91-3), enforcement of child online safety laws has been largely ineffective, fiercely opposed by online providers, and often blocked by courts based on usability, privacy, or First Amendment grounds.

Meanwhile, 41 states have sued Meta, and 14 have sued TikTok, alleging that they knowingly enrolled children without parental consent, failed to implement adequate age verification systems, designed their social media platforms and algorithms to be addictive to increase advertising revenue, all while concealing the resulting harm to children’s mental health and well-being. These lawsuits rely on consumer protection, fraud, and negligence statutes (which have no First Amendment shield), as well as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires verifiable parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under age 13, and mandates age verification for websites or services primarily directed at that age group.

How

How It Works

WebShield’s patented breakthrough innovations enable convenient, high-assurance, and privacy-preserving mechanisms for age verification and parental consent:

Quantum Privacy for bulletproof end-to-end privacy and cybersecurity.
Proof of Trust to enforce data and governance rights across parties.
Unified Trust Model for global regulatory compliance at scale.

What This Looks Like for a Family

A 12-year-old wants to sign up for a social media platform. Today, the platform either asks for a birthdate (easily lied about), demands a government ID (privacy nightmare), or does nothing. With Privacy Networks, it works differently:

The child’s parent has already set up age and consent rules in their family’s Personal Privacy Network. When the child tries to sign up, the platform requests age verification through the Privacy Network. The parent receives a consent request. The parent approves, sets time limits and content restrictions. The platform receives a verified “under-13, parental consent granted” credential — without ever learning the child’s name, the parent’s name, their address, or any other identifying information.

If the child tries a different platform the next day, the same process works — the parent gets another consent request, and can set different rules for that platform. One system, every platform, full parental control, zero data collection.

This is what the laws require. Current technology can’t deliver it without compromising privacy. Privacy Networks can.

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Get Involved

Parents, educators, child safety advocates, technology companies, and policymakers — help build the infrastructure that protects children online without compromising anyone’s privacy.

Two ways to participate. Apply to join the Accelerator to protect children from harmful online content, empower parents with privacy-preserving tools for age verification and consent, and support businesses in complying with child safety regulations. Or record your contributions through QPN Catalyst — no signup required.

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