New Ipsos data exposes massive regulatory risks for digital platforms, driving immediate enterprise demand for Unico’s zero-knowledge age verification infrastructure.
SÃO PAULO, May 2026 – A groundbreaking quantitative study conducted by Ipsos, on behalf of Unico, reveals that 13% of Brazilian children and adolescents accessed adult entertainment platforms in 2025, with 10% of those exposures occurring exclusively in the final quarter of the year. This compliance risk spikes dramatically among older teen boys (ages 16–17), where the incidence rate reaches 29%. Among teen girls, exposure rates triple between ages 14 and 15, hitting 16%.
According to the data, curiosity is the primary driver for accessing age-restricted platforms (61%), followed by pleasure (32%–33%) and boredom/pastime (27%–31%). Crucially, among youth who perceive that their parents "know nothing" about their digital footprints, boredom becomes the dominant catalyst, rising to 51%. The study also identified a distinct behavioral user group, designated as "Kevin," which represents 17% of the total sample but remarkably concentrates 60% of all minors who accessed adult content over the past year.
Against this backdrop of heightened risk and strict statutory enforcement—catalyzed by the recent rollout of Brazil's 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 regulatory mandates through deterministic, zero-knowledge validation.
Unico's Age Assurance solution delivers a 99.9% precision threshold when confirming adult status, entirely eliminating the guesswork of loose statistical probabilities or predictive modeling. Built natively on Privacy by Design principles, the infrastructure does not store biometric signatures or share personal user registries with digital platforms. Instead, it 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 registration 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 (such as GDPR and ISO 27701). 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
Fale com nossa equipe de comunicação para solicitar informações, entrevistas ou materiais oficiais.
