Colombia weighs age verification rules to protect minors online
Colombia is advancing new measures to protect children and teenagers online, but age verification raises another challenge: how to do so without increasing the amount of personal data collected by platforms.
Verifying the age of minors online has become a challenge that goes beyond restricting their access to platforms: it also requires ensuring that those protections do not end up exposing their personal data.
Colombia is advancing measures to protect children and teenagers in the digital environment, while debate grows over how to verify users’ ages without collecting unnecessary information.
Colombia strengthens digital protection for minors
The discussion is particularly relevant in the context of International Youth Day, observed on August 12. In Colombia, the issue also has a new regulatory framework and an ongoing debate over how minors access social media.
Law 2489 of 2025 and its implementing regulation, Decree 769 of 2026, establish shared responsibilities among digital platforms, educational institutions, families and public entities to reduce the risks minors face online.
At the same time, Congress is debating the possibility of restricting social media access for children under 16 and requiring effective age-verification mechanisms.
Internet access broadens the challenge
The need to advance these measures is also linked to how Colombians connect to the internet. More than 90% of the population aged five and older uses a mobile phone as its main means of accessing the internet, according to DANE.
Among minors, the risk is also evident: figures from the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare indicate that 65% of children between 10 and 13 say they have been exposed to violent or inappropriate content on social media.
Protecting minors, however, raises another question: how can platforms verify that a person meets the required age without asking for more information than necessary? International experience shows that restricting access alone does not always solve the problem.
In many cases, platforms continue to rely solely on age self-declaration systems, a mechanism that several studies have shown can be easily circumvented. Australia and France have shown that the challenge also lies in finding mechanisms that can reliably verify age without compromising privacy.
The discussion is beginning to shift toward how age should be verified. For Namirial, a provider of trust and digital identity services, technologies exist that can validate certain attributes without requiring additional information to be shared.
Verification seeks to preserve privacy
”The conversation should not focus solely on how we restrict access, but on how we verify age securely while respecting people’s privacy. Today, there are technologies capable of confirming whether someone meets an age requirement without revealing their identity or storing unnecessary data. That is the path toward more effective and responsible digital protection,” said Elías Barzallo, CEO of Namirial for Colombia and Ecuador.
This approach is related to the concept of data minimization, which is already part of international trends in digital identity. Associated tools include verifiable credentials and zero-knowledge proofs, which allow users to demonstrate a condition, such as being of legal age, without sharing additional personal data.
With the new regulations being implemented and the debate over minors’ access to digital platforms still open, Colombia faces a challenge that combines two objectives: protecting minors and safeguarding people’s privacy during verification processes.
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