Governing Childhood in the Digital Age: Reimagining Child Rights in an Era of Age Verification, Algorithmic Profiling and Platform Commercialisation

Abstract

• The generation coming of age today is the first in human history whose childhood is co-authored by machines. Children now constitute roughly one-third of all internet users worldwide, yet the international legal architecture built to protect them the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 predates the World Wide Web itself. This paper interrogates the widening gap between that analogue-era framework and a digital ecosystem organised around continuous data extraction, algorithmic profiling, behavioural advertising and design engineered for compulsive engagement. Moving beyond the binary of protection versus access, the paper argues that child-rights governance must be reimagined along a third axis: graded, risk-calibrated participation that safeguards the child’s evolving autonomy while imposing enforceable obligations of care on digital platforms. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative methodology, the paper examines the normative foundations laid by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment No. 25 (2021) and traces their translation into binding law across five jurisdictions the European Union, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and India with attention to the most recent 2025–2026 developments, including India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, the European Commission’s age-verification Recommendation of April 2026, the French Conseil constitutionnel’s censure of the under-15 social-media ban, the stalled American KIDS Act, and the European Commission’s proposed EU KIDS Act of September 2026. The paper further undertakes a thematic analysis of age-appropriate design, age assurance technologies, profiling-driven behavioural advertising, dark patterns, and the commodification of children’s data and attention. It finds that regulatory regimes remain fragmented, privacy-invasive in their verification methods, and insufficiently attentive to children’s participatory rights. The paper concludes with a set of calibrated recommendations for a rights-respecting, interoperable and enforceable global framework for digital childhood