Privacy and protection of personal data are on the Brazilian National Congress agenda. The country’s delay in legislating on this subject is upsetting: over 100 countries already have a regulation on the matter and Brazil is excluded from the list of countries considered as “adequate” by the European Union to act as receivers of personal data of European citizens, therefore preventing this data from being transferred to Brazilian companies in some circumstances, which undermines our capacity of innovating and competing in this market.

Several bills that establish rules for the collection and processing of data are being discussed by Congressmen and Senators — among them the PL 5276/2016, a bill written by the Executive Branch which went through an extensive online public debate (followed by InternetLab in a report published in the beginning of this year) before being sent to Congress.

Focusing on the legislative discussion, from July 11th-15th we prepared the Data Protection Special. Our goal was to bring to the surface important topics that Congressmen and Senators should consider when discussing a new “general law for the protection of data”. We dealt with 5 main topics of the law in 5 days, with comments from representatives of the private sector, scholars and the civil society: (i) what is personal data?; (ii) what can authorize the treatment of personal data?; (iii) what is public data?; (iv) Big data: what protections do data subjects have at their disposal?; and (v) enforcement: how should the “competent entity” be?.

The content is available in Portuguese and English in the format of a digital booklet and it will be a reference for the debate in the National Congress.