Brazil’s ANPD Opens Public Consultation on Age Assurance Guidance

Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority has opened a public call for contributions on a guide for reliable age verification, setting out the technical methods that technology providers can use to confirm the age of users under the country’s new child-protection law. The consultation, run through the government’s Brasil Participativo platform, is open until July 9.

The guide implements the Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents, enacted as Law 15.211 of 2025, which obliges providers of digital products and services to take steps to keep children and adolescents away from inappropriate content and data practices. Age assurance is the gateway mechanism for those obligations, since a provider must first establish how old a user is before applying age-appropriate protections, and the ANPD’s guide is intended to give providers a consistent baseline for doing so.

The draft addresses specific technical methods. It covers facial age estimation, which infers an age range from an image of a person’s face, and document verification, which checks an identity document to establish age. The agency frames these as options along a spectrum, to be matched to the risk of a given service rather than applied uniformly, and emphasizes that age assurance should respect data-minimization principles so that confirming a user’s age does not become a pretext for collecting more sensitive data than necessary.

“Active listening from society is an essential pillar for building balanced and effective regulation,” said Lucas Borges de Carvalho, Superintendent of Regulation at the ANPD, framing the consultation as a way to gather input from providers, researchers, and civil society before the guidance is finalized.

The consultation builds on earlier work by the agency. The ANPD published preliminary age assurance guidance as the digital child-protection law took effect, surveying available age-verification technologies and cautioning that biometric approaches must be weighed against data-minimization requirements. The new consultation expands that into a more detailed guide with defined baseline requirements.

Brazil’s process adds another jurisdiction to a global wave of age-assurance regulation. Courts and regulators in France and across the European Union have pushed platforms toward age verification, and the European Commission has sought a privacy-preserving age verification solution built around minimal data disclosure.

Sources: ANPD

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team