Online Protections for Minors

ECA Digital: How New Rules Could Transform the Digital Sphere

The enactment of the Digital Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA Digital – Law No. 15,211) represented one of Brazil’s landmark regulatory developments in 2025. Aiming to protect minors in digital spaces, the legislation imposes new obligations on technology product and service providers, including risk management frameworks to address the safety and well-being of minors, age-verification mechanisms, mandatory consent from guardians, and measures to prevent access to content classified as inappropriate by the law.

Throughout 2026, the focus is expected to shift to the effective implementation of these obligations, which will require establishing structured risk assessment and mitigation processes. Companies will also be expected to strengthen parental oversight tools, adopt procedures for the proactive removal of serious content, and comply with mandatory reporting requirements to the competent authorities. A complex adaptation period is expected, with significant implications for technology product and service providers, as well as mounting pressure for transparency, governance and preventive safeguards to ensure the safety and integrity of minors when accessing online environments.

The ECA Digital introduces heightened criminal compliance duties. Companies must remove and report content involving sexual exploitation, abuse, kidnapping and grooming, mitigate serious risks, adopt measures to prevent minors’ access to inappropriate content, as well as comply with mandatory reporting obligations to the authorities whenever necessary

Paula Moreira Indalecio

Partner – White Collar Crime

Platforms should adopt age-sensitive design principles, incorporating proportional age-verification and differentiated user experiences by age group. Privacy should be the default, with profiles set to private, geolocation disabled, and data collection kept to a minimum. It is also essential to limit advertising and profiling, provide effective parental oversight tools, review algorithms to reduce risks and compulsive usage patterns, conduct impact assessments focused on minors, and maintain ongoing, multidisciplinary governance