Every Breath You Take: Three Features That Decide Who Can Reach a Child
For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover The Police performing “Every Breath You Take”.
The previous post in this series, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, took the three features that turn a child’s attention into money: the streak and the reward loop, the profile built to sell, and the box you pay to open. The fix there was a line the feature may not cross, since none of those three has an honest child-facing version. This post turns to the set that our You Spin Me Round blog post promised would come next, the features that decide who can reach a child, namely the stranger in the inbox, the map that knows where you sleep, and the broadcast that cannot be taken back.
The three share a subject the earlier posts did not: who is allowed to find, watch, and reach a child at all. The good news for a drafter is the same as in the last two posts. EU law already treats contact and exposure as harms, and the European Commission has already written the safe defaults down. Its guidelines on the protection of minors, issued under Article 28(4) of the Digital Services Act (DSA), set a minor’s account to the highest privacy by default, turn geolocation off by default, and turn the hosting of a live stream off by default. What EU law has not yet done is make those defaults binding on every service a child can open, or settle what livestreaming requires once a child is already broadcasting. This post looks at what each feature does to a child, what EU law already contains, what is missing, and what the drafting should say. The through-line is the repository’s principle of safe and private by design and by default.
The open inbox lets a stranger reach a child
Before a child chooses anything, a default setting decides who can find them, message them, and see what they post. Left public, it lets an adult the child has never met into their messages, and since people rarely change a default, that starting position decides the outcome for most. The rule already exists: Article 28(1) of the DSA requires services accessible to minors to be private and safe by default, and the Commission’s guidelines set the detail, from highest privacy by default to keeping minors out of the suggestions shown to adults, with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) behind it. The work is to enforce it.
The loophole stems from the instrument’s nature and scope. The guidelines are a benchmark rather than a binding line, and the duty spares the smallest services, so a child can still land on a default built for the platform. Close that, and the fix is the card’s: Highest privacy by default, no unsolicited adult contact. Each step down from the default is the minor’s own choice. Save the Children, whose Jeffrey DeMarco called the ban the wrong instrument, Euroconsumers‘ youth panels and the Child Rights by Design work make the same case: build the service around the child, and the stranger is much less likely to reach the inbox.
The shared location tells a stranger where a child is
Location turns a service on a screen into one that reaches the street. A child’s position can be shared without them noticing, or handed to strangers through a feature that lists whoever is nearby, and the Commission’s own risk catalogue is blunt about it: geolocation is a tool a predator can use to find a child. Here EU law is specific. The guidelines set geolocation, the microphone and the camera off by default for minors and switch off again anything a child turns on, and the GDPR treats a child’s location as data to be minimised, not gathered by routine. Again, the magic solution lies in (more) enforcement.
The gap has two halves. The default lives in guidance, not a binding rule that reaches every service, and nothing yet stops a platform from using a child’s location to introduce a stranger, the people-nearby feature the default alone does not touch. The fix in our card closes both: Precise location sharing off by default for minors; no use of location data to suggest connections with nearby strangers. The first half is a default the child can lower to share with a chosen friend. The second is closer to a line, since no version of matching a child to a stranger by proximity serves the child.
The live broadcast shows a child to everyone at once
A live stream is the child in real time and unedited: face, voice, bedroom, whatever sits behind the camera. Strangers watch and comment as it happens, a comment is a way in, and although the label says live, a stream can be recorded and passed on, so it cannot be taken back. It folds the other two issues together, namely contact and location, into one act the child performs on themselves. EU law has made a start: the guidelines turn off live-stream hosting for minors by default.
Here more is missing than anywhere else. Off by default is not an age floor, and it says nothing about who may watch or contact a child who goes live, or about the recording that outlasts the broadcast. The United Kingdom’s Ofcom finalised its children’s codes in 2025 but has its livestreaming rules only at the proposal stage, , so there is no settled standard to copy and the EU has to write this one itself. The fix is a floor: No livestream broadcasting by minors under 16 by default, with a supervised mode as the possible exception. Safeguards on who can watch and contact a minor who streams. A child broadcasting live to a crowd they cannot see has no safe setting to leave on, which is why the answer starts at no.
These three set a default the child starts behind
With three drafting moves on the table, the shape of the series is clearer. The first post switched a manipulative pattern off by default and left a dial for the older child or the parent, and it worked on the child’s time. The second drew a line the feature may not cross, because the streak, the sold profile and the loot box have no honest child-facing version, and the move was a plain prohibition. This post sets a starting position for who can reach the child and hands the child the controls. Highest privacy, location off, no public broadcast: each is a place the child starts, rather than a manipulation to switch off or a practice to forbid.
What separates this from the first post is the subject and who holds the controls. There the switch sat with the older child or the parent. Here the guidelines themselves put incremental control with the child as they mature, presented neutrally and easy to undo, with a guardian’s tools meant to support that autonomy, not stand in for it. Livestreaming is where the default stiffens toward the second post’s line, which is where it belongs, because an irreversible harm calls for a floor. Read together, the three posts assemble a small drafting kit: a default with a dial, a line no feature may cross, and a starting position a child grows out of at their own pace. A ban holds none of the three. It asks a child’s age at the door and, having asked, walks away.
A plan says a child is not there to be watched
The Police song sounds like devotion but isn’t. Over that soft, insistent guitar figure, a voice promises to keep another person under ceaseless watch, to account for their every movement and never let them out of sight. Sting, the man who wrote it, has been clear for years that it describes surveillance and possession, not love. A platform built around these three features makes the same offer in the same voice. It calls the open inbox connection, the shared map closeness, and the live broadcast community, and every one of them is a way of not letting a child out of sight, of keeping the child findable, watchable and reachable by whoever is on the other side of the glass. The warmth is the cover. The watching is the product.
A plan starts the child somewhere else. It puts the child out of view by default, lets the child decide, step by step, who is allowed closer, and, where a harm cannot be walked back, it sets a floor rather than a setting. We spent the first half of this year asking whether a ban is a plan. The repository now sets out what a plan looks like, feature by feature, and these three are the ones that decide who can reach a child, the ones a ban never touches, because a ban asks how old the user is and then leaves the door to everyone else exactly where the platform hung it. A plan for the young generation should be made with them, not against them, and it should let a child be the one who decides who is watching.
Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research
