G7 Data Protection Summit: Call for rules on age verification and smart homes The G7 supervisory authorities demand strict protection of fundamental rights in online age verification and are targeting connected children's rooms. The digitalization of everyday life increasingly poses challenges to privacy protection, not least for minors. At their annual meeting, which concluded on Friday in Paris under the chairmanship of the French supervisory authority CNIL, the G7 data protection authorities therefore focused on the digital security of children and adolescents. The summit resulted in groundbreaking decisions on the contentious issue of age verification online and security in smart homes. In the Declaration for privacy-friendly age verification, which is controversially debated in Germany as well as a social media ban, the G7 data protectionists do not fundamentally oppose reliable exclusion criteria for children and adolescents in parts of the internet. According to them, age controls could be an important tool to protect young people from content harmful to minors, such as pornography, or to enforce legal age limits in social networks. However, the experts warn against the unthinking, widespread use of such systems: a surveillance mania harbors considerable risks for the fundamental rights and freedoms of all users, for example through the restriction of freedom of opinion and information. They demand that age safeguards must always be proportionate and strictly aligned with the specific context and the actual risk. Before states resort to such far-reaching technical controls, parental supervision and digital media literacy should be strengthened as a priority. Strict conditions for online age verification If online age verification is unavoidable, data protection must be built directly into the technology (Privacy by Design), the paper states. The G7 data protectionists emphasize that the data collected must be used exclusively for age verification and must not be misused for user