Ipsos study reveals 25% of minors bypass access restrictions on digital platforms, driving the market demand for Unico's zero-knowledge, 99.9% accurate Age Assurance infrastructure.
SÃO PAULO, May 2026 – A breakthrough quantitative study conducted by Ipsos, on behalf of Unico, reveals that 25% of children and adolescents have bypassed age gates on digital platforms by falsifying their age. Among the primary drivers, 62% stated they "strongly wanted to access the platform but did not meet the age requirement," while 26% believed there was "no real harm" in inputting false age metrics. The benchmark study also highlights that 96% of youth possess at least one active social media profile, with internet connectivity remaining constant throughout the day.
The research exposes a critical variance in the perception of parental oversight. While 64% of children aged 10 to 13 believe their parents are fully aware of their digital footprints, that metric plummets to just 45% among older teens aged 16 and 17. Crucially, minors who report that their parents "know nothing" about their online activities experience a three-fold increase in exposure to online threat vectors (37% victimization, compared to 13% for youth under active parental supervision).
Against this backdrop of systemic risk and tightening regulatory enforcement—catalyzed by Brazil's new child online safety mandate, Law No. 15.211/2025 (ECA Digital)—Unico, the leading identity verification network in Latin America, has launched its proprietary Age Assurance technology. The cloud-native, friction-free verification engine allows platforms to verify whether a user is an adult via a real-time selfie, satisfying strict statutory guidelines through deterministic, zero-knowledge validation.
Unico's Age Assurance solution delivers a 99.98% precision threshold when confirming adult status, entirely eliminating the guesswork of loose statistical probabilities or predictive estimates. Built from the ground up on Privacy by Design principles, the infrastructure does not store biometric data or share personal user registries with digital platforms. Instead, it processes the image and returns a binary, encrypted response: confirming whether the user is of legal age or a minor. The entire verification lifecycle takes just 2.5 seconds, eliminating onboarding friction and preventing user drop-off.
"The operational velocity of this solution is supercharged by our advanced Liveness Detection infrastructure," said Gabriela Dias, Director of Product and Security at Unico. "While the global tech sector debates baseline frameworks, Unico already operates a robust defense matrix featuring four protection layers and four automated reaction layers. This architecture detects and intercepts deepfakes and AI-generated spoofing injections in real time, stopping malicious users from bypassing age restrictions."
This new age assurance capability integrates natively into Unico's core enterprise infrastructure, which processed over 1.5 billion identity transactions in 2025. The system operates under airtight information security protocols, employing end-to-end encryption, automated data masking, and total compliance with Brazil's LGPD and global privacy frameworks. All verification data is utilized exclusively for instant authentication and is securely purged immediately after the API call.
Methodology: A quantitative study conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Unico Brazil. The research featured 1,200 online interviews via the Ipsos Online Panel, with a margin of error of ±2.8 percentage points.
Unico is the leading identity verification network in Latin America, and a global provider of trust infrastructure. By utilizing proprietary technology biometrics and machine learning, Unico eliminates fraud and secures digital transactions for a safer, more efficient world. For more information, visit www.unico.io.
Media Contact: unico@agencia.pub
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