Until recently, opening an account on the apps children use most in Brazil was a matter of typing a birth date. A study by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br) found that 21 of 25 digital services used by children did not check age at sign-up. What changes with Brazil's ECA Digital law (Law 15.211/2025), in force since March 17, 2026, is that protection also becomes a duty for the companies that build the product. This guide uses the articles checked on the Planalto website, run by Brazil's presidency, to show what that means for the family of a Pathfinder aged 10 to 15.
What is Brazil's ECA Digital law and what changed in March 2026?
ECA Digital is the short name for the Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente), Brazil's Law 15.211 of September 17, 2025, which the Brazilian press also calls the Felca Law. It keeps the 1990 Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA), extends the same full protection to the internet, and covers every digital product aimed at children and adolescents or likely to be accessed by them, from apps and games to app stores and operating systems (arts. 1 and 2). The law took effect in Brazil on March 17, 2026 (art. 41-A), and Decree 12.880/2026 gave the National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) the job of regulating and enforcing it.
The law uses the ECA's age groups: a child is anyone under 12; an adolescent is anyone from 12 to 18 (art. 2 of Law 8.069/1990). A Pathfinder aged 10 or 11 counts as a child under the law, one aged 12 to 15 counts as an adolescent, and the whole club is covered.
What is the social media minimum age in Brazil under ECA Digital?
The law does not set a single minimum age. The age band comes from the Classificação Indicativa, the official age rating system of Brazil's Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP), which weighs each service's content and features. According to the official questions-and-answers document, updated in July 2026, the most used social networks in Brazil are not recommended before age 14, 16 or 18, and each one's rating appears in the app store. These ratings have already been revised since the law took effect and may change again, so check the rating of the specific network on the day your child asks for it.
The most concrete change for families is in art. 24: accounts of children and adolescents up to age 16 must be linked to the account of a legal guardian. Every Pathfinder, from 10 to 15, falls into that group. What if the parent has no account on that network? In that case, the platform must prevent the supervision of the child's profile from being lowered to a less protective level (art. 24, § 5).
The Brazilian government sums up its choice this way: instead of banning social media for minors, as other countries have done, the law bets on supervision by parents and guardians. The decision about when your child joins a network still belongs to the family, now with better information.
How do parental controls work under ECA Digital?
Before the law, safety depended on parents finding every setting. In the same CGI.br study, 15 of the 25 services offered parental controls, but in 14 of them the protection was switched off. ECA Digital flips that logic: default supervision settings must use the highest level of protection available (art. 17, § 4), with contact limited to authorized users, limits on autoplay, on rewards for time spent and on notifications, control over recommendations, and restrictions on sharing location.
Designing screens to weaken parental supervision is prohibited (art. 18, § 2), and the decree lists hiding or obstructing access to privacy and parental supervision controls among manipulative practices (art. 10 of Decree 12.880/2026). The tools must give parents the powers set out in art. 18, summarized in the table.
| The tool must let parents | Article |
|---|---|
| See and manage the child's account and privacy | Art. 18, I |
| Restrict purchases and financial transactions | Art. 18, II |
| Identify the adults the child communicates with | Art. 18, III |
| See total usage time | Art. 18, IV |
| Turn safeguards on and off | Art. 18, V |
| Use information and controls in Portuguese | Art. 18, VI |
Source: Law 15.211/2025, art. 18, on the Planalto website (in Portuguese, checked in October 2026).
How does Brazil's age verification law work for apps and social media?
For content that is inappropriate or banned for anyone under 18, an “I am 18” button is no longer enough: art. 9, § 1, requires reliable age verification at every access and prohibits self-declaration. The decree brings offline bans to the internet, such as pornography, betting, alcohol, cigarettes (including e-cigarettes) and weapons (art. 15 of Decree 12.880/2026).
Verification starts on the phone itself. App stores and operating systems must check the user's age and pass an age signal on to apps (art. 12). Downloads by children and adolescents require parental consent, and silence does not count as permission (art. 12, § 2). To protect privacy, the decree orders the copy of the ID document used in the check to be deleted immediately (art. 24, § 3).
An honest caveat: not everything shows up on your phone yet. The government acknowledges that implementation requires changes to products and that the ANPD will guide the stages. Meanwhile, use the controls your device already offers.
Read alsoWhat age should a child get a phone and social media?Which games does ECA Digital ban, and what is Brazil's loot box ban?
No game has been banned. The government's official document is direct: the only explicit ban related to games is on reward boxes, or loot boxes (art. 20), the surprise chest or pack a player pays for without knowing what is inside (art. 2, IV). Under the decree, a game with this feature must block it for minors through age verification, offer a version without it or keep it locked by default (art. 23 of the decree). The risk logic is similar to that of online betting and gambling.
In-game chat changed too. Games with text, voice or video chat must, by default, limit interaction between users to ensure parental consent (art. 21, sole paragraph). Age ratings now take features into account, not only content, as the table shows. Since ratings for popular titles can be revised, this guide does not state the age for any game: check the current rating in your device's app store before installing.
| Rating | Examples of features that lead to that rating |
|---|---|
| Age 12 | Advertising, or challenges and rewards that do not involve money |
| Age 14 | Online purchases or chat between users without checking age or asking for parental permission |
| Age 16 | Sharing data and location, content-steering algorithms, infinite scroll and constant notifications |
| Age 18 | Betting, surprise purchases (loot boxes), dating features, dangerous challenges or adult content |
Criteria from the 5th edition of the MJSP Practical Guide to Age Rating (Ordinance 1.048/2025), as reported by Agência Brasil, November 2025.
What does ECA Digital forbid companies to do with your child's data?
Every like and every search says a lot about a person. ECA Digital prohibits building behavioral profiles of children and adolescents to target commercial advertising (art. 26) and using profiling, emotion analysis or virtual reality to aim ads at them (art. 22).
When harm has already happened, platforms must remove content that violates the rights of children and adolescents as soon as they are notified by the victim, their representatives or the Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministério Público), without waiting for a court order (art. 29). As a legal guardian, you can file a notice, and it must identify the content and the person reporting it (art. 29, § 2).
For companies that break the rules, art. 35 provides for a warning, a fine of up to 10% of the economic group's revenue in Brazil in the last fiscal year (or, with no revenue, R$10 to R$1,000 per registered user, capped at R$50 million per violation, in Brazilian reais) and, by court order, suspension or prohibition of activities.
What are parents' responsibilities under ECA Digital?
The law shares the load, but it does not take the family out of the game. Art. 3, sole paragraph, guarantees children and adolescents the right to be educated, guided and accompanied by their parents in their internet use, and it assigns parents active and ongoing care. Art. 6, § 1, adds that companies' duties do not release parents from acting, and the decree speaks of shared responsibility among government, families, civil society and companies (art. 4, IV).
A simple plan for this week: create your own account on the networks your child uses and link it; open the supervision settings together, with no secrets; check each app's rating; block purchases made without your approval; agree on what to do when a stranger starts a conversation. The law asks that supervision follow the child's progressive development (art. 17, § 2). In practice, at 10 you approve almost everything, and at 15 the conversation matters more than the block. For time limits and device controls, see the guide on screen time and technology at home.
How can the Pathfinder Club help with this conversation?
The Pathfinder Club, a Seventh-day Adventist Church ministry for ages 10 to 15, is a place where your child spends hours with trusted adults, away from screens, and that opens conversations that sometimes stall at home: a Unit meeting about scams in games, a Counselor who casually asks who your child's online gaming friends are. The guide to the Computers and Internet Honor includes a section on browsing safely, and the article on social media with purpose helps teens think about their own online presence.
The club also has its own duties when posting photos of Pathfinders, explained in the article on the image consent form for the club, and conduct rules for leaders, gathered in the guide to child protection in the Pathfinder Club. When in doubt, ask the Director. A well-run club answers calmly.