Children’s digital protection in Brazil. Law 15.211 of 2025, the ECA Digital, in force since 17 March 2026: the first Brazilian law to put rules and penalties directly on digital platforms where children and adolescents may be. I have been reading the law and the decree and mapping what each kind of product owes.
Five pillars: age verification and access, reinforced parental supervision, prevention and protection, dangerous content, and commercial exploitation.
Scope is triggered by probable access, whether or not the product is aimed at minors.
Verification at every access is the heaviest obligation in the law, and the technical format of the age signal is not standardised yet.
As practice, I started a small NestJS service for a fictional network of thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds: a reporting channel with a documented flow and proof of what was done with each report, as the law asks.
“Attention is harvested from children who cannot consent, by systems built to hold it.”
“The harm a technology does is understood years after it ships, and restricted years after that. Tobacco took decades. Slot machines took decades. This took until 2026.”
“The child appears here as a party with rights, and in every product on the market as the object of somebody else’s settings.”
Attention, and what software does to it. The 2026 shelf: twenty-odd books on attention, technology, and the mind, read this year, with marks out of ten. Two courses this year: Tech Ethics (HarvardX, completed) and Digital Wellbeing (University of York, in progress).
The product in the studio came out of this reading, and so did the decision to pause it.
I write about it: on AI latency as a variable reward for developers, and on what the economics of AI do to software work.
A Janela Imprevisível (2026, in Portuguese): Why the uncertain latency and quality of AI tools work on developers like a slot machine.
A nova economia do software (2026, in Portuguese): Principles for building software when production is cheap and judgment is the bottleneck; an eleven-slide carousel on LinkedIn.
End-to-end tests for Next.js with Nightwatch, GitHub Actions, and Docker (2020, in Portuguese): A suite that gated deploys, and later rotted, which taught me what a test suite costs.