Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, also known as the Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente (EDCA), came into force on 17 March 2026. It is one of the world’s most comprehensive digital child protection laws, with profound implications for the Brazilian education system.
School administrators, IT managers, and education policymakers now have a legal obligation to consider every technology product deployed in classrooms. LibreOffice, the FOSS office suite developed and maintained by The Document Foundation, is uniquely positioned to meet these obligations by design.
What the law actually requires
The EDCA establishes that every IT product or service directed at children and adolescents – or “likely to be accessed” by them – must guarantee their integral protection, prioritise their best interests and maintain the highest level of privacy and data security (Art. 3). Among the law’s key requirements are:
- Privacy by default and by design. Products must operate at the highest available level of data protection as a default setting, and any reduction in protection must require explicit, informed consent (Art. 7).
- No behavioural profiling. Any form of automated or manual profiling of minors based on behaviour, preferences, economic status or location is subject to strict limitations (Arts. 2(V) and 26).
- No predatory commercial exploitation. Techniques that profile children for advertising purposes are explicitly prohibited, as are design patterns intended to encourage prolonged use (Arts. 22, 17).
- Digital citizenship education. The promotion of the safe, responsible and critical use of technology is listed as one of the foundational principles for all IT products used by minors (Art. 4, VIII).
- Transparency and accountability: Technology providers must be auditable and have a legal representative in Brazil, as well as publishing transparency reports (Arts. 31 and 40).
Educational software is not exempt from this law. Any office suite, productivity tool or learning application running on school devices is an IT product as defined in Art. 1, and the access standard is deliberately broad.
Why LibreOffice fits natively
LibreOffice was not designed to exploit the attention of its users. It is not a cloud service. It does not collect usage telemetry by default. It does not profile users. It does not display adverts. There are no engagement algorithms optimised to keep students on the platform.
In the language of the EDCA, it is a product whose architecture embodies the principle of privacy by design (Art. 7), and not because it has been retrofitted to comply, but because there is no commercial incentive for it to do otherwise.
Specifically:
No data leaves the classroom without explicit configuration. LibreOffice runs locally on the desktop, and documents are stored wherever the school chooses. There is no background synchronisation with a vendor’s cloud and no automatic transmission of usage patterns to a third party. It is the school, and not a foreign corporation, that controls the data environment.
It is auditable to the source code. According to the EDCA, technology products must be evaluated for their potential impact on the health and safety of children and adolescents (Art. 8, I). LibreOffice’s source code is publicly available under the Mozilla Public Licence, and can be inspected by any school, researcher or public authority. There is no black box.
There are no manipulative design patterns. The law explicitly prohibits features that artificially extend or sustain product use by minors, such as autoplay, reward programs, non-essential notifications and personalised recommendation systems (Art. 17, §4). LibreOffice has none of these features. It opens a document, it helps the user to work with it, and then it closes. This is what neutral, instrumentally focused software looks like.
It supports digital citizenship education. Art. Article 4, Section VIII of the EDCA establishes the promotion of “digital citizenship and critical thinking for safe and responsible technology use” as a foundational principle. Using LibreOffice in schools is a pedagogical act in itself as it teaches students that software is a tool and not a service that monitors them; that their documents belong to them and are stored in open standard formats (ODF), which any compatible application can read; and that technology infrastructure can be based on transparency rather than restriction.
Open Document Format is digital sovereignty. ODF, LibreOffice’s native format, is an ISO-certified open standard. Documents created by Brazilian students today will be readable ten years from now by any application that respects the standard without requiring vendor permissions or subscription fees, and data being routed through a foreign corporate infrastructure. This is not an incidental feature but a material expression of the EDCA’s guarantee of meaningful access to digital technologies (Art. 5, §2).
In plain terms, schools deploying LibreOffice do not need to read a 200-page data processing agreement to understand what happens to their students’ data. They do not need to complete a vendor questionnaire and wait for a legal team in the US to respond, or to negotiate a contractual carve-out for LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados) compliance, or worry about whether a new product feature silently changes the default privacy configuration.
The architecture answers the question. Local software, open code, no telemetry, no profiling and no engagement design are not compliance claims that need to be verified. They are structural properties that can be confirmed by any competent system administrator.
Under the EDCA, transparency is not optional. It is what the law demands.
A Call to Action for Brazilian Education
The EDCA came into force on 17 March 2026. Schools and municipalities that have not yet reviewed their technology stack now have a legal obligation, rather than just a policy recommendation, to do so. The Document Foundation invites Brazilian educators, school administrators and public procurement officers to:
- Audit existing deployments of proprietary cloud platforms against the EDCA’s requirements for privacy by default, data minimisation and prohibition of behavioural profiling.
- Evaluate LibreOffice as a classroom productivity solution, including the enterprise-ready LibreOffice Technology ecosystem for schools requiring centralised administration and support.
- Adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as the institutional open standard for document formats to ensure that student work remains portable, open and free from vendor dependency.
- Engage with the community. LibreOffice is developed by a global community of active contributors, including many in Latin America. Brazilian schools that adopt LibreOffice are not just consumers, but they can help to shape the tool that their students use.
The Lei da Criança e do Adolescente is a law that protects children in digital environments, and LibreOffice is a software that was never designed to exploit children. This is not a coincidence, but the consequence of a shared understanding of what technology should be in a democratic society: a tool for users, not the other way around.
The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice. LibreOffice is free to download, deploy and use. For information on enterprise deployments and certified support providers, visit https://www.libreoffice.org or write to info@documentfoundation.org.
The LibreOffice documentation team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Calc Guide 26.2.
