To minors, of Sim card few are registered. Because the choice is almost always that of make them payable to a parent and then give the smartphone with the SIM in question to the children for use. However, in principle there is no legislation that prohibits the registration of a telephone SIM card, for voice and data connections, to a minorAnd. In fact, there is no minimum age limit. As Guido Scorza also confirms, lawyer and member of the Privacy Guarantor, at very low ages the thorny and most delicate issue becomes, if anything, that of the collection and processing of minors’ data. But the 8 year threshold established by many telephone operators does not have any ironclad regulatory origin: in fact, it is one commercial choice.
In fact, almost all the offers reserved for children to be associated with the relevant SIM registered in the name of the little ones start from that age, which usually end at 15 years of age. This is, for example, the case of the Shake Remix Unlimited Junior by Vodafone or the Juniors of the same name by Tim and Wind3. As the comparator Selectra comments, however, “it is clear that the costs of the tariffs dedicated by operators to children and teenagers are average, but in too many cases they are even much higher. The real flaw is that, too often, these offers exclusively dedicated to children have a data package too low compared to the other attractive offers available on the market”. This is why, with the same costs and also in the legislative doubt regarding the possibility of registering a card in the name of the little ones, parents often choose traditional packages, as mentioned more generous than GB, registering the Sim and giving it to their children to use.
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The topic was discussed again because from November 21st, on the (few) SIM cards registered to minors or with rates reserved for active minors – including those for those aged 15 or 16 onwards who can sign them independently, obviously always with an identity document and in person – a navigation block will be automatically applied. There are eight categories of banned sitesfrom pornographic ones to those that promote violence and self-harm up to those in which weapons are sold (or advertised), to those that expose practices that can damage health and, among others, those involving betting and gambling or anonymization of web traffic.
A measure taken by the Communications Authority with a resolution (9/23/Cons of last January 25th) and which, however, risks remaining a dead letter. Except to the extent that, knowing now about automatic blocking simpler than the other available methods, I can encourage parents to register a SIM in their children’s name accompanied by the relevant junior rate, rather than proceeding with the historic attitude of making them use their own card and perhaps getting lost among a thousand apps and control settings.
Among other things, it is also unclear which sites will actually be blocked from this default parental control. If Agcom communicates the criteria later, In the meantime, operators can and must use proprietary blacklists or those provided by specialized consultants. Parents – for whom the services remain available parental control of smartphones or specialized apps, which however do not seem to work properly, hence the automatic blocking imposed by the Agcom guidelines – they will be able to unblock some categories of sites or deactivate the filters completely, just as it will also be possible to activate them on registered SIMs to adults.
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In fact, parental control is available to all users and must be free in any case: to manage it you need to access the reserved pages on the operator’s website or manage it via a pin received when the SIM was activated, a code received via email or text message or the Spid digital identity. Any other additional service can obviously be charged for by the operator and it is best to make sure that they are not conveyed together with the possible activation of the filters, in cases where you want to enable them proactively. As explained, the best choice remains to register a SIM directly in the minor’s name, together with a dedicated tariff, to have the service already active and without doing anything else.