Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met today with Google Vice President for Privacy, Safety and Security Evan Kotsovinos, Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy for Greece, Cyprus, and Malta Eugenia Bozou, and other Google executives.
During the meeting, ways of strengthening cooperation between the government and Google were examined, with the aim of further improving mechanisms for protecting children and adolescents from harmful or dangerous content, while discussing the initiatives undertaken by Greece, both at national and European level, to protect minors on the internet and tackle digital addiction.
Among other things, the development of “KidsWallet” was noted, which is the first government application that allows parents to set limits on their children’s use of social media and also provides the ability to verify the user’s age.
It was noted that our country has also taken the lead in the European consultation on establishing a European digital majority age and on the mandatory integration of parental control tools in all devices connected to the internet, proposals that have been widely accepted among EU member states.
In this context, Greece is one of the five countries that have been selected to pilot the European age verification system and has already integrated it into “KidsWallet” and is due to come into operation at the end of October.
At the beginning of the conversation, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Evan Kotsovinos had the following dialogue:
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: You know how committed we are to this concept. Of course, we’re right now also in discussions with the European Commission to see whether we can develop more European solutions. This is an issue of great concern to us, as it is also to you. I’m very interested to find out more about what it is you have done -you’re aware of what it is that we are doing-, and what is also your view on how we can move this discussion forward in cooperation.
Evan Kotsovinos: Thank you for having us, Prime Minister. We’re thrilled to be here to talk about our common goal, our shared goal to protect children online. We wanted to say that we thank you for your leadership and for your interventions in this space. It’s been important to us. We know that collectively, as a digital society, we need to do more, and we are doing more, in fact, to protect children.
We’ll talk about how we empower parents and children in the digital world and how we protect them in our products. We will also share with you a piece of research that we did recently that shows how much teens rely on online experiences and on technology for their education and for their social development.
Before closing, I wanted to say that we also want to talk about the issue of age assurance and age verification. It’s critical to be able to protect children online. It’s critical to know their age, to know whether a user is a child or not. We’ve been collaborating on that very closely. We’re very excited about the partnership. Thank you for having us here. We’re looking forward to the conversation.
Dimitris Papastergiou: Yesterday was a very interesting day because we were together with Evan and we discussed at the auditorium about age verification and how we can approach the whole matter. From the other side, I was with Commissioner Virkkunen. We showed how we can implement till the end of this month the new age verification approach, the new technical approach that the EU has decided to follow. Now the decisions are in front of us. That’s why we’re here, to discuss further.
