Scholars and activists from Lavits (Latin American Network on Surveillance, Technology and Society Studies), received with surprise and discredit the news that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) signed an agreement for delivering personal data from Brazilian voters to SERASA, the country’s biggest credit-referencing agency. Although more recent news informs that TSE states that no data has yet been shared with the credit institution, the signing of the agreement demonstrates breaking of a trust relationship established between citizens and the TSE as a public institution. Not only the electoral tribunal but any Brazilian public body has yet to define appropriate standards and policies for protecting citizens’ personal data.
In a statement given just after news about the agreement leaked to the press, the president of the TSE, Minister Carmen Lucia, said she was unaware of the case and called for the suspension of any such agreement. That demonstrates a lack of control of the institution on the information it collects. “Some judges said that the agreement does not represent a threat to the moral integrity of citizens. But it certainly plays against the moral integrity of the very TSE by ‘breaking’ the principle of responsibility to protect personal data, regardless of the use and the type of agreement that is made with third parties in the private sector. Even if it is alleged that the information is not as sensitive, they are citizens’ personal data, says Rodrigo Firmino, Lavits member and professor of urban management at PUCPR. According to him, the company (SERESA) should find legal and transparent ways of collecting users’ data, and not rely on public institutions to do so (which acquire citizens’ data for other purposes).
The agreement signed looks even more outrageous when one takes into account the fact that SERASA is a private company whose business is based on the comercialization of personal information. The legitimacy of the commercial use of personal data is still a little discussed issue and its implications need to be debated both by the State and the academy.
Luis García Fanlo, also a Lavits member and professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, states that the situation is similar in other Latin American countries. “In Argentina we have the Spanish company Indra in charge of the electoral process since 1997. It is not under any kind of public control by the State or public agencies. It is responsible for designing, planning, organizing and operating the service for counting provisional election results, but nobody knows how it stores or manages the louboutin schuhe database.”
In Brazil, there are many projects and actions that signal a broad effort toward the construction of large databases of citizens’ personal data. Among many actions, there is the creation of the new Brazilian identity document (Civil Identity Registry), the initiative to re-register electors for including their biometric information, regional departments of transit’s use of biometrics as a means of identifying conductors, just to name a few. All of these cases define biometrics as a form of authentication system and are boosting the formation of what is known as the “identification industry”, very aware of the potential market for data collection, identification, registration and the sharing of information about 190 million users. It is an industry that involves a wide range of public and private stakeholders, including legislators.
On the one hand, it is argued the need for digitization and modernization of information systems in the country, on the other, it is increasingly clear that the construction of these databases (which runs from collection to storage and exchange of data) is something rarely discussed by the public, and with almost no legal support for the protection of personal data. In many countries, the possibility of building a single document or an electronic ballot box generate a lot of debate and strong opposition, but that louboutin schuhe does not happen in Brazil.
According to Marta Kanashiro, professor at Unicamp and member of Lavits, “the scenario is unfolding in a worrying picture: a political class unprepared and poorly informed on the subject, or ally of those systems that can produce assets to the so-called identification industry or to what they perceive as technological modernization.”
Check here the agreement between TSE and SERASA (in Portuguese).