Brazil’s Digital ECA: Why Age and Safety Are Becoming Core Infrastructure

In September 2025, Brazil enacted one of the world’s most comprehensive digital child protection laws. Known as the Digital ECA (Bill 2628/2022), the law introduces strict new requirements for any digital service that is aimed at, or likely to be accessed by, users under 18 in Brazil. With enforcement beginning March 18, 2026, its implications extend far beyond Brazil’s borders.

At its core, the Digital ECA reflects a broader global shift: child safety, age assurance, and parental involvement are no longer optional safeguards or policy statements. They are becoming hard regulatory requirements that must be enforced at the system level.

Who the law applies to

The scope of the Digital ECA is intentionally broad. It applies to any digital service, including games, social platforms, and apps, that is accessed by minors in Brazil. Importantly, this includes services not explicitly designed for children but that are likely to attract under-18 users.

This framing mirrors a growing international trend. Regulators are moving away from narrow definitions of “children’s services” and toward a reality-based assessment of who is actually using a platform.

What changes under the Digital ECA

The law introduces several requirements that fundamentally change how platforms must operate for Brazilian minors:

Reliable age verification
Simple age self-declaration or age gates are no longer considered sufficient for adult content or high-risk features. Providers must implement effective and reliable age verification methods before allowing access to these features.

Account linking and parental involvement
For social media services, users under 16 must have their accounts linked to a parent or legal guardian. This creates an explicit expectation of verifiable parental consent and ongoing oversight.

Hard prohibitions for minors
Certain practices are banned outright for users under 18. These include paid loot boxes in electronic games and targeted advertising or profiling using a minor’s personal data.

Safety by default
Parental controls must be enabled at the highest setting by default, and services must ensure localization, including Portuguese language support.

Taken together, these requirements move beyond content moderation and into product design, monetization, and default system behavior.

The operational challenge for global platforms

For companies operating across multiple regions, the Digital ECA highlights a growing problem: regulatory requirements are becoming more specific, more enforceable, and more localized.

Hardcoding Brazil-specific logic into products creates long-term risk. Feature bans, age thresholds, consent flows, and default settings vary not only by country, but increasingly by age group and risk category. Maintaining separate implementations for each jurisdiction does not scale.

The real challenge is not understanding the law. It is operationalizing compliance in a way that is flexible, auditable, and sustainable.

Why infrastructure matters

The Digital ECA makes clear that age and safety controls must operate as infrastructure, not one-off checks. Platforms need the ability to:

• Reliably determine whether a user is a minor
• Apply different rules based on jurisdiction and age
• Enforce feature restrictions automatically
• Support parental consent, account linking, and meaningful controls
• Demonstrate compliance through evidence and auditability

This is not a single feature. It is a coordinated system of decisions applied consistently across a product.

How k-ID fits into this shift

k-ID is designed for exactly this regulatory reality.

Rather than hardcoding rules, k-ID provides infrastructure that allows platforms to orchestrate age, policy, and compliance signals dynamically. For Brazil, that means automatically disabling restricted features like loot boxes or targeted ads for Brazilian minors, while keeping them available elsewhere. It means supporting verifiable parental consent flows where required, and enforcing safety-by-default settings across systems.

Most importantly, it allows platforms to adapt as regulations evolve, without rebuilding their products each time a new requirement takes effect.

Looking ahead

Brazil’s Digital ECA is not an outlier. It is a preview of where digital regulation is heading globally. Laws are becoming more specific, enforcement more active, and expectations for child protection more concrete.

For digital services, the question is no longer whether age and safety regulation will apply. It is whether their systems are built to handle it.

March 18, 2026 is approaching quickly. The companies that succeed will be those that treat compliance not as a patch, but as part of their core infrastructure.

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