UK OSA Section 15 — User empowerment duties (children's safety)
Provide children and parents with safety management tools including parental controls, content filters, contact management, and usage tools
Where this comes from
Provision: Section 15 — User empowerment duties (children's safety)
Instrument: UK Online Safety Act 2023
Citation: Online Safety Act 2023, c. 50, Section 15; Ofcom Children's Safety Codes of Practice (December 2024), Chapter 8 (User empowerment)
Text version: Online Safety Act 2023 c. 50, as enacted (legislation.gov.uk)
Who it applies to
Child audience (designed for OR likely accessed by children) — any one of these:
- Service is specifically designed for children under 18
- Service is likely to be accessed by children under 18
Remaining applicability scope — all of these:
- Youngest user age is Under 13 or 13-15
- Service requires/offers account registration
What engineering work it implies
Sample acceptance criteria Landfall generates for this obligation:
- Implementation or documented process meets the reviewed acceptance criteria; identify the tested version and deployment status separately
- Configure defaults from the assessed source and purpose; do not enable data collection or processing merely because this task exists
- Validate behavior for the assessed actors and use cases, including applicable guest or administrator paths
- UI clearly communicates what the feature does to users
- API returns appropriate error codes when feature blocks an action
Questions people ask
- Does UK OSA Section 15 — User empowerment duties (children's safety) apply to my service?
- It applies when at least one of: Service is specifically designed for children under 18; Service is likely to be accessed by children under 18; and Youngest user age is Under 13 or 13-15; Service requires/offers account registration.
- From when does this apply?
- UK OSA Section 15 — User empowerment duties (children's safety) applies from 16 December 2024. Its current status is: in force.
Find out whether this one lands on you
Landfall's pre-scan answers the applicability question above for your product in minutes, then turns every obligation that applies into traceable engineering tickets with a citation chain your auditors can follow.
Not legal advice. Landfall maps regulatory obligations to engineering work for planning purposes. Its verdicts are not legal advice and create no attorney-client relationship — verify with qualified counsel before relying on them.