  Despite the increasing awareness from academia, civil society and media to
the issue of child manipulation online, the current EU regulatory system fails
at providing sufficient levels of protection. Given the universality of the
issue, there is a need to combine and further these scattered efforts into a
unitary, multidisciplinary theory of digital manipulation that identifies
causes and effects, systematizes the technical and legal knowledge on
manipulative and addictive tactics, and to find effective regulatory mechanisms
to fill the legislative gaps. In this paper we discuss manipulative and
exploitative strategies in the context of online games for children, suggest a
number of possible reasons for the failure of the applicable regulatory system,
propose an "upgrade" for the regulatory approach to address these risks from
the perspective of freedom of thought, and present and discuss technological
approaches that allow for the development of games that verifiably protect the
privacy and freedoms of players.
