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By Francisco Camargo, President of ABES
In the digital age, data, metadata, whether personal or not, are the new raw materials of the economy. Collecting them, mining them, transforming them into useful information, in the various fields of science, economics, everyday life, will generate the value chains of the future.
The examples are many and already ubiquitous in our life. Metadata from thousands of cars, for example, such as location and speed allow drivers to improve their routes and improve the flow of traffic in large cities.
The free flow of data allows and will allow Brazil to access and continue to access, develop and export cutting-edge technologies and services, placing the country in new global value chains, not only in the global Information and Communication Technology market, but in all economic activities.
The innovation and competitiveness of Brazilian companies increasingly depend on the free flow of data, which has the process built on a broad and complex global architecture that collects, stores, processes and transfers data globally.
The serious problem of Personal Data Privacy is discussed in Brazil, and Brazil has to make some choices.
The same people who ask for more privacy disclose their entire personal life on social networks, do not want their smartphone to collect data from their geographic location, but then, when they are in traffic, ask for help from applications that depend precisely on that information.
Privacy depends on several factors, the first is the transparency of who is collecting the data: it must be clear in the “contract” between the user and the companies which data is being collected and with whom it will be shared.
The second is data security, ranging from collection, storage and sharing. The company that collects the data must comply with national, global and even private regulations, such as PCI, which is the Private Global Standard for the collection and storage of Credit Card data.
Privacy, first of all, aims to limit the possibility of identity theft, then to protect people's privacy.
Most of the cases that happened in Brazil originate from the “victims” themselves, who let themselves be caught in moments of intimacy or revealed their location and present and future activity on social media sites.
In Brazil, the most important identification number for the citizen, the CPF, is exposed, unencrypted, unmasked, on the internet. The lack of a Brazilian data protection rule hinders compliance with any other privacy rules that may be adopted.
That said, we are back to the insertion of Brazil in the worldwide flow of data, whose restriction without objective criteria will weaken the productive sector with regard to innovation and competitiveness.
Brazilian restrictions on the flow of data, due to the principle of reciprocity, will generate restrictions from other countries on the same flow.
An example of this is how the “cloud computing”, a data processing and storage service offered by remote access, which takes place on a global scale, will be affected. Only the cloud can scale storage needs and computing power very quickly at a low price.
An example is the processing of invoices, in which one of the associates ABES (Brazilian Association of Software Companies), which processes 500 thousand bills per day, was pleasantly surprised to see, on Black Friday, its demand reach 2 million bills taxes on the day, and the cloud computing infrastructure instantly accompany this increase in demand.
Public services will also have direct interference, as limiting the flow of data can also hamper innovation and improved supply. In this category we can fit apps like Uber, Waze, Google, which depend on sharing and processing data.
A study by the European Center For International Political Economy (ECIPE) estimates that this change in the dynamics of the data flow could reduce global GDP growth by up to 2%. At the local level, it has the potential to decrease Brazil's GDP by around 1%, having a direct effect on sectors that depend on this free flow.
With regard to national economic performance, another impact will occur in the export of ICT services, which generated about US$ 2 billion in 2016, according to data from the Central Bank.
One of the current discussions in Brazil is whether our legislation should approach that adopted by the European Union, which limits the free flow of personal data to countries that adopt European or American standards, with much less regulations and barriers.
Choosing the right strategy is fundamental for Brazil.
The USA is now Brazil's largest trading partner, responsible for 46.8% for the purchase of services and technological applications. A possible solution would be the adoption of minimum standard clauses, which will allow us to continue operating with the USA and, at the same time, open the doors of the European market.
To defend the maintenance of the free flow of data means to follow the path of global sustainable development, based on the service economy, which generates wealth and prosperity for the peoples. In this context, the encouragement of good practices for the protection of personal data, transparency and security, must be the object of multilateral or pluriregional efforts.
ABES started the Brasil Pais Digital initiative precisely to discuss this and other issues of interest to the digital economy, to which many civil society entities have joined and which explains, in non-technical terms, for the general population, the great technological dilemmas by which we pass: www.BrasilPaisDigital.com.br.
The examples are many and already ubiquitous in our life. Metadata from thousands of cars, for example, such as location and speed allow drivers to improve their routes and improve the flow of traffic in large cities.
The free flow of data allows and will allow Brazil to access and continue to access, develop and export cutting-edge technologies and services, placing the country in new global value chains, not only in the global Information and Communication Technology market, but in all economic activities.
The innovation and competitiveness of Brazilian companies increasingly depend on the free flow of data, which has the process built on a broad and complex global architecture that collects, stores, processes and transfers data globally.
The serious problem of Personal Data Privacy is discussed in Brazil, and Brazil has to make some choices.
The same people who ask for more privacy disclose their entire personal life on social networks, do not want their smartphone to collect data from their geographic location, but then, when they are in traffic, ask for help from applications that depend precisely on that information.
Privacy depends on several factors, the first is the transparency of who is collecting the data: it must be clear in the “contract” between the user and the companies which data is being collected and with whom it will be shared.
The second is data security, ranging from collection, storage and sharing. The company that collects the data must comply with national, global and even private regulations, such as PCI, which is the Private Global Standard for the collection and storage of Credit Card data.
Privacy, first of all, aims to limit the possibility of identity theft, then to protect people's privacy.
Most of the cases that happened in Brazil originate from the “victims” themselves, who let themselves be caught in moments of intimacy or revealed their location and present and future activity on social media sites.
In Brazil, the most important identification number for the citizen, the CPF, is exposed, unencrypted, unmasked, on the internet. The lack of a Brazilian data protection rule hinders compliance with any other privacy rules that may be adopted.
That said, we are back to the insertion of Brazil in the worldwide flow of data, whose restriction without objective criteria will weaken the productive sector with regard to innovation and competitiveness.
Brazilian restrictions on the flow of data, due to the principle of reciprocity, will generate restrictions from other countries on the same flow.
An example of this is how the “cloud computing”, a data processing and storage service offered by remote access, which takes place on a global scale, will be affected. Only the cloud can scale storage needs and computing power very quickly at a low price.
An example is the processing of invoices, in which one of the associates ABES (Brazilian Association of Software Companies), which processes 500 thousand bills per day, was pleasantly surprised to see, on Black Friday, its demand reach 2 million bills taxes on the day, and the cloud computing infrastructure instantly accompany this increase in demand.
Public services will also have direct interference, as limiting the flow of data can also hamper innovation and improved supply. In this category we can fit apps like Uber, Waze, Google, which depend on sharing and processing data.
A study by the European Center For International Political Economy (ECIPE) estimates that this change in the dynamics of the data flow could reduce global GDP growth by up to 2%. At the local level, it has the potential to decrease Brazil's GDP by around 1%, having a direct effect on sectors that depend on this free flow.
With regard to national economic performance, another impact will occur in the export of ICT services, which generated about US$ 2 billion in 2016, according to data from the Central Bank.
One of the current discussions in Brazil is whether our legislation should approach that adopted by the European Union, which limits the free flow of personal data to countries that adopt European or American standards, with much less regulations and barriers.
Choosing the right strategy is fundamental for Brazil.
The USA is now Brazil's largest trading partner, responsible for 46.8% for the purchase of services and technological applications. A possible solution would be the adoption of minimum standard clauses, which will allow us to continue operating with the USA and, at the same time, open the doors of the European market.
To defend the maintenance of the free flow of data means to follow the path of global sustainable development, based on the service economy, which generates wealth and prosperity for the peoples. In this context, the encouragement of good practices for the protection of personal data, transparency and security, must be the object of multilateral or pluriregional efforts.
ABES started the Brasil Pais Digital initiative precisely to discuss this and other issues of interest to the digital economy, to which many civil society entities have joined and which explains, in non-technical terms, for the general population, the great technological dilemmas by which we pass: www.BrasilPaisDigital.com.br.
Francisco Camargo, president of ABES, is a production engineer from the Polytechnic School of USP, specialization from Harvard University. Founder of Grupo CLM, Latin American distributor focused on Information Security, Advanced Infrastructure and Analytics.
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