(Sao Paulo) – Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on September 17, 2025, signed the nation’s first legislation to guard kids’s rights on-line, Human Rights Watch mentioned right this moment.
The legislation, referred to as the ECA Digital after its Portuguese initials, is meant to replace the nation’s 1990 Statute of the Child and Adolescent to guard kids’s rights within the digital atmosphere. Technology corporations with companies possible for use by kids could be compelled to design merchandise with younger customers’ finest pursuits in thoughts and supply them with the very best ranges of privateness and security by default.
“Brazilian kids are lastly getting the protections they want and should be taught, discover, and play safely on-line,” mentioned Hye Jung Han, kids’s rights and expertise researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch.
The new legislation expands upon the protections for youngsters offered by Brazil’s General Personal Data Protection Law, that are inadequate.
Two of the ECA Digital’s strongest provisions straight reply to issues raised in current Human Rights Watch investigations. One provision prohibits on-line companies from utilizing kids’s private information in ways in which “trigger, facilitate, or contribute to the violation of their privateness or every other rights assured to them by legislation … and the[ir] finest pursuits.” In June 2024, Human Rights Watch documented that Brazilian kids’s private photographs had been used to construct highly effective synthetic intelligence instruments later exploited to create abusive deepfakes of different kids.
Another safeguard within the legislation bans on-line companies from profiling kids to focus on them with behavioral promoting, which entails monitoring a baby’s on-line habits to foretell their traits and affect their behaviors and pursuits. This displays suggestions in April 2023 and May 2022 Human Rights Watch investigations, which documented that kids in Brazil and world wide had been secretly surveilled of their on-line school rooms and throughout the web by way of invasive profiling and behavioral promoting methods.
Passage of this legislation displays robust political will to guard kids’s rights on-line, Human Rights Watch mentioned. The legislation, which was first launched by Senators Flavio Arns and Alessandro Vieira in 2022, unanimously handed the Senate in November 2024, cleared the Chamber of Deputies in August 2025 with help from all however one political social gathering, and was then accredited once more by the Senate only one week later.
This broad help enabled the invoice’s passage into legislation regardless of fierce opposition from tech corporations. Industry lobbying weakened a number of the laws’s unique proposals, together with the removing of a ban on “loot packing containers” in video video games – options that encourage kids to spend cash for randomized rewards – within the model of the invoice that was accredited by the Chamber of Deputies. In a notable last-minute reversal, the ban was reinstated within the last textual content accredited by the Senate after robust opposition to the removing by Senator Arns, one of many invoice’s co-sponsors.
The ECA Digital is about to take impact in March 2026 and will likely be enforced by Brazil’s information safety authority. Companies that don’t comply may face fines as much as 50 million Brazilian reais (US$9.44 million), or as much as 10 p.c of the income they earn in Brazil. They might also face a suspension or a ban, relying on the severity of the violation.
How the legislation is enforced will decide whether or not Brazil will meaningfully shield kids’s rights on-line, Human Rights Watch mentioned. The information safety authority ought to meaningfully seek the advice of with kids because it begins creating protections for youngsters’s vary of rights, and make sure that the company’s enforcement of the legislation protects everybody’s rights. The authorities also needs to construct on this momentum and proceed to construct robust information protections for Brazilians of all ages.
“Brazil has stepped ahead as the primary nation in Latin America to go a devoted legislation to guard kids’s on-line privateness and security,” Han mentioned. “Other governments ought to watch, be taught, and do the identical.”
Source: Human Rights Watch
