This standard cannot be bought.

Foreningen Custorian. Danish non-profit. CVR 46399455.
Standard licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — public even if the organisation dissolves.

Board of Directors of Foreningen Custorian, elected by the general assembly. Under the articles (§ 5), the board is one to five members serving two-year terms and elects a chairperson from among them (who also serves as treasurer unless the board decides otherwise). As the board grows, foreningen policy reserves at most one seat for any commercial party; the remaining seats are drawn from academic researchers, civil-society organisations, hotline operators, independent child-safety experts, and an independent chair.

The foreningen does not certify platforms directly. Certification is issued by independent accredited Certification Bodies operating under a published scheme. The foreningen maintains the scheme and licenses the “Custorian Certified” trademark to qualifying bodies.

Advisory Board of 7–9 experts across five domains — child rights, law & regulation, technology & security, academic research, and law enforcement — plus a youth representative (16–21) with lived digital experience. Advises on standard content and ethical oversight. Does not govern.

The standard is open and free to implement — any platform or vendor can build to it. Custorian’s reference tooling is operated within the non-profit. Should any commercial entity ever be involved in implementation, it is bound by the same rule as any vendor: certified on identical terms, zero vote on the standard, no privileged position. The independence of the standard does not depend on who builds the tools.

Firewalls keep the standard independent and prevent capture: board-composition cap (at most one commercial seat), identical-terms certification, 30% single-funder cap, executive overlap limited to 24 months, biennial independent governance review, whistleblower channel to an external ombudsperson, revocable trademark licence. All decisions published with rationale. No pay-to-play.

Custorian follows the path of PCI DSS (payment-card security) and EPEAT (sustainable electronics) — voluntary technical standards that became the de facto industry benchmark through market adoption and public procurement, ahead of and alongside formal regulation. We are pursuing de facto adoption now, through the pilot programme with early-mover platforms, while working in parallel toward formal European standardization via Dansk Standard and CEN — a rigorous, multi-year process. The two tracks reinforce each other: real-world pilots prove the standard works; formal standardization gives it lasting institutional and legal weight.

Pre-publication: developed as a working draft on the European standards track (CEN / Dansk Standard). After publication: annual review with a public comment period, and an emergency review procedure for critical threats.

Each control is an auditable, measurable requirement that a digital service must implement to protect children. 147 are required for conformity. 8 are addressable. Read the white paper on Zenodo.

Every control is assessed against defined evidence — not self-declaration — and scored pass, partial, or fail, using one or more of:

Gameable test inputs are held in a versioned internal appendix shared only with accredited assessors; the criteria — what “pass” means — are public.

Controls are weighted (most 1.0; a few addressing the most severe harms carry 1.5 or 2.0). Certification is granted by an accredited body against a scope tier:

Not every service is assessed against all 155 controls — the applicable scope depends on the platform's type, user base, features, and the level of risk it presents to children.

The standard organises 155 controls into six functional domains. Each domain addresses a distinct dimension of child digital safety.

Age verification, age estimation, age-appropriate access, accuracy thresholds, facial age-estimation assurance. 31 controls.

Algorithmic safeguards, dark patterns, recommender systems, content moderation. 32 controls.

Children's data minimisation, retention, encryption, profiling restrictions. 18 controls.

Parental dashboards, monitoring boundaries, age-graduated child autonomy, multi-guardian support. 18 controls.

Threat detection across seven categories, CSAM reporting, incident response. 30 controls.

Child Safety Officer, staff training, vendor management, regulatory mapping. 17 controls.