LatAm in Focus: The Push for Data Protection in Brazil

The cultural shift toward data protection can be seen anecdotally through lawyers and business officials transitioning to data officers, as well as in a push for open discourse about data protection within individual firms. The cultural shift alone, however, is not the only reason why Brazil has been able to avoid increased personal data collection during the pandemic. Zanatta also points to a general disinterest by the government to undertake a more robust coronavirus response, one that would include mass contact tracing via technology. “It's a cruel thing that [President Jair Bolsonaro] is not concerned with the pandemic,” says Zanatta, but that disinterest generated one positive thing: “He did not implement any set of robust technological mechanisms to trace contact or to monitor people.”

Despite the grassroots push for more data protections and the LGPD, concerns over the issue persist. The federal government’s response to the new law is going extremely slow, says Zanatta. Government data policies—particularly those conducted by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency, known as ABIN—have the courts’ attention before, and certain data collection practices have already been ruled unconstitutional. Additionally, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling soon on a case regarding a 2019 executive decree to create a unified database of Brazilian citizens. Zanatta’s organization, Data Privacy Brasil, will be serving as an amicus curiae, or technical adviser, on that case. 

Zanatta sees the case as a way to defend what he calls “the informational separation of powers,” which aims to prevent oversharing and overexposing Brazilians’ data. “Data protection is perceived as an autonomous fundamental right because it’s really about the flow of data and how it influences the distribution of power and money in society and how it generates abusive discrimination in some ways,” Zanatta says. That’s why he is particularly concerned with using data to “score” or rank people through algorithms as well as the use of AI facial recognition technologies. As for the future, Zanatta will be watching the 2022 Brazilian general elections and how the new legislation could affect them. 

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Katie Hopkins produced this episode. The music in this podcast was performed at Americas Society in New York. Learn more about upcoming concerts at musicoftheamericas.org.