The prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met today with her vice president Google responsible for privacy and security, Evan kotsovinosthe head of government relations and public policy for Greece, Cyprus and Malta Eugenia Bozu and other executives of Google.

During the meeting, ways to strengthen cooperation between the government and Google were examined, with the aim of further improving the protection mechanisms of children and adolescents from harmful or inappropriate content, while discussing the initiatives that Greece has taken, both at national and European level, to protect it.

Among other things, the development of the Kidswalletwhich is the first state application that allows parents to set limits on the use of social media by their children and, on the other, enables the user age.

It has been emphasized that our country has also led the European Consultation to establish European digital adulthood and the compulsory integration of parental control tools into all devices connected to the Internet, proposals that have been widely accepted between EU Member States.

In this context, Greece is one of the five countries selected to pilot the European age confirmation system, which has already been integrated into Kidswallet and its productive function is scheduled for the end of October.

At the start of the discussion, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Evan Kotsovinos had the following dialogue (informal translation from English):

Kyriakos Mitsotakis: You know how much importance we attach to this purpose. Of course, we are also currently in discussions with the European Commission to see if we can develop more European solutions. This is a matter that concerns us a lot, like you. I am very interested in learning more about what you have done – you know what we do – and also what is your view of how we can move on to this discussion through our cooperation.

Evan kotsovinos: Thank you for the invitation, Mr Prime Minister. We are excited to be here to discuss our common goal of protecting children online. We want to thank you for your leading role and for your interventions in this area. It is very important to us. We know that collectively, as a digital society, we must do more, and in fact we do more, to protect children.

We will discuss how we strengthen parents and children in the digital world and how we protect them in our products. We will also share with you a recent research that shows how much teenagers are based on online experiences and technology for education and social development.

Before closing, I would like to say that we also want to talk about the issue of age assurance and verification. It is vital to be able to protect children online. It is vital to know their age, to know if a user is a child or not. We work very closely on this issue. We are very excited about cooperation. Thank you for the hospitality and look forward to the discussion we will have.

Dimitris Papastergiou: Yesterday was a very interesting day, because we were with Evan and we discussed the age verification and how we can approach the whole issue. With the executive vice -president of the Commission, Ms Virkkunen, we have shown how we can implement the new age verification strategy by the end of the month, the new technical approach that the EU has decided to follow. Now decisions are ahead of us. That’s why we are here to discuss further.