For many years the largest democracy in Latin America has been a pioneer in data management. 1995 she founded the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee. The stakeholder panel helped establish principles for Internet governance. Driven by Edward Snowden’s revelations, the government of Dilma Rousseff 2014 pioneered the Marco Civil, a kind of “Internet Bill of Rights ”, which even Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, praised. Four years later, Congress passed a data protection law, the LGPD, which is closely based on the European General Data Protection Regulation.

But times are changing. Even before the Covid – 19 – The pandemic, the Brazilian government had started to build a comprehensive infrastructure for data collection and monitoring. In October 2019 President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree obliging all federal agencies to share much of the information they have about Brazilian citizens own – from health data to biometric data – to be used jointly and stored in a master database, the Cadastro Base do Cidadão.

The official line behind this measure: through simple information exchange the government wants to increase the quality and consistency of its data in order to improve public services, curb electoral fraud and reduce bureaucracy. Critics warn, however, that such a concentration of data under Bolsonaro’s right-wing extremist leadership could easily be misused to restrict privacy and civil liberties. Especially since the scope for data collection is great. In addition to basic information such as name, marital status and occupation, the Cadastro is supposed to record biometric information such as face profiles, voice samples, iris and retinal scans, prints of fingers and palms and even a profile of the corridor. There are no limits to the exchange of health data, even gene sequences may be passed on.

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