Why the Wikimedia Foundation is advocating proportionality and carve-outs for digital public goods in Brazil’s new online child safety law, ECA Digital

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has actively engaged with Brazilian authorities following the September 2025 adoption of the Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent (Digital ECA; Law No. 15.211/2025; Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente [ECA Digital], Lei nº 15.211/25 in Portuguese). The law establishes a new framework for protecting minors in digital environments, building on a law passed in 1990 that guarantees children access to fundamental rights like life, health, freedom, respect, dignity, education, culture, sport, and leisure. One of the new law’s core principles is a sweeping requirement that app stores and certain online platforms implement age verification mechanisms to show only content deemed appropriate for minors given their age. However, the law as written is very broad and its requirements could potentially impact everyone’s ability to exercise their human rights on public interest projects like Wikipedia. To help shape the enforcement of this regulation in a manner that best protects child safety online while still enabling human rights such as freedom of expression and access to reliable information, the Foundation submitted two separate sets of public comments.

On 14 November, 2025, the Foundation submitted a joint response with Wikimedia Brasil to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security’s public consultation on age verification. Separately, on 12 December, 2025, the Foundation submitted its own comments to the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD in Portuguese) on another public consultation regarding the law’s proportionality criteria specifically. (Please find links to the English language versions of the submissions at the end of this blog post.)

Unexpected limitations to the exercise of human rights online

The Foundation strives to create a world where everyone can access knowledge freely, regardless of their location or age. In that spirit, our submission urges Brazilian authorities to implement the Digital ECA without undermining Wikimedia projects and other similar digital public goods that millions of people rely on to access and share free and open knowledge made available in the public interest.

Brazil’s efforts to protect children and adolescents online are admirable. However, the Digital ECA introduces sweeping obligations that can be detrimental to users’ rights: age verification mechanisms. No technological solution, including age verification technologies, is a magical solution to social issues online. As we explain in our submission, such a mandate typically requires verifying the age of every single user, not only those who are minors. As such, the mandate affects everyone’s rights, and does so in a manner that conflicts with the Foundation’s mission to provide free and open access to the sum of all human knowledge.

As detailed in our submission to Brazil’s justice ministry, whether conducted at the app store or platform level, mandatory age verification poses significant risks to human rights, including privacy, freedom of expression, and access to reliable information for the following reasons:

• Age verification currently relies on the collection and storage of platform users’ personal data, which can pose serious security and privacy risks to them, especially if age verification is conducted using sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) like government IDs or biometric information. 

• Linking a person’s legal identity to their online activity can cause a “chilling effect,” that is to say, a fear of retaliation that might also lead to self-censorship in accessing or sharing information, constituting a direct barrier to freedom of expression and access to reliable information, regardless of age.

• Mandatory age verification might also disproportionately exclude vulnerable communities depending on the technology that is used, which not only stores extremely sensitive personal data but can also be unreliable: people with low income as well as migrants and refugees might lack access to formal identification or reliable digital infrastructure, and biometric verification systems are known to be invasive and discriminatory, often misidentifying people of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people.

The need for proportionality

In both submissions, the Foundation calls on Brazilian regulators to recognize the diversity of online platforms. The law itself already recognizes that its provisions should be applied according to the size and nature of each platform: however, it provides no further explanation on how such differentiation will be made or how the legislation will be applied to different platforms. For instance, the risks associated with large, for-profit social media platforms differ significantly in nature, magnitude, and likelihood from those posed by digital public goods and educational projects. This is why the principle of proportionality—in other words, the balancing of legal measures—is critical, as we emphasized in our submission to the ANPD.

We urged the ANPD to clarify how the law will be applied based on its concept of a platform’s “degree of interference” with content on its platform—in other words, the law could be applied depending on the intensity of content moderation that each platform performs. A “one-size-fits-all” regulatory model is inappropriate and can create significant barriers to access for users, regardless of their age.

Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia rely on a vibrant community of over 260,000 volunteers to create, edit, and verify content. This community-led Wikimedia model is what allows the Foundation to not have to create or curate content on the platforms. Because of this, the Foundation interferes only minimally with content when required by law. The Wikimedia projects neither engage in targeted advertising nor do they collect, sell or monetize data from users of any age, which are key differences with other for-profit platforms. This operational model significantly reduces, to use the language of the law, the Foundation’s ability to “influence, moderate, or intervene” in content, potentially justifying a less strict application.

Given that projects like Wikipedia have a distinct risk profile and a public interest mission, Brazilian authorities should clearly distinguish among platforms’ risk profiles and create carve-outs for digital public goods and educational projects. We call for exceptions that would encompass important tools for online learning and information sharing like encyclopedias, educational services, and other public interest platforms. Furthermore, we urge Brazilian authorities not to impose uniform compliance obligations that digital public goods, such as Wikipedia, may be unable to meet. Educational resources and community-driven projects do not have the same financial, technical, or organizational capacity as Big Tech platforms, and any regulation should reflect these differences to avoid creating unnecessary barriers for users to public interest information.

Ultimately, the implementation of the Digital ECA should center on upholding human rights and adopting a proportionate approach to regulatory mechanisms according to each individual platforms’ risks. This balanced framework is necessary to protect children online while preserving an open, diverse, and accessible internet for everyone, which can help to foster a diverse, public interest online information ecosystem.

For more details, you can read our complete submissions (in English) to the Brazilian authorities’ public consultations: 

• Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Brasil joint submission to the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety of Brazil (14 November, 2025)
• Wikimedia Foundation submission to the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) of Brazil (12 December, 2025) 

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