Protection of Personal Data in Brazil

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Article 2, Principles

Article 2º. - The fundamental principles of the protection of personal data are:

I. - the respect to privacy;

II. - the enlightened self-determination;

III. - the freedom of expression, information, communication and opinion;

IV. - the inviolability of intimacy, of honor and of the image;

V. - the economical and technological developments as well as the innovation;

VI. - the free initiative, the free competition and the consumer protection;

VII. - the human rights, the free development of the personality, the human dignity and the exercise of citizenship by natural persons.

§9. The Article 2 states the above principles, and about them we can express, respectively:

I. - the respect to privacy only works until the limit of national security;

II. - the informed self-determination shall considers that the self-determination is proportional to the enlightenment about the information, what is different from person to person;

III. - the freedom of expression, information, communication and opinion, all of this will depends completely of the political and juridical ethos of the time, e.g., in a recent past of Brazil was prohibited to express ideas like it was in the Europe of the Saint Inquisition or in the Nazism of Germany;

IV. - concerning to the inviolability of intimacy, of honor and of the image, we can express again in an another way: these rights can be relativized easily, like in a criminal case or with the question: what is honor?);

V. - the economical and technological developments as well as the innovation are like a kind of protection against moralism in new researches, situation that often happens with nuclear energy and genetics, for example;

VI. - the free initiative, the free competition and the consumer protection are principles of a more sustainable economy, which are in other legislations, like the Federal Constitution, the Code of Consumer Protection, the Antitrust Law, etc);

VII. - and concerning to the human rights, the free development of the personality, the human dignity and the exercise of citizenship by natural persons we can remember that Hannah Arendt already taught us that there is no effective human rights without a power able to protect the person – in this perspective, it is important have a strong citizenship to have an environment able to protect a human right.

§10. All these principles are spread in the Brazilian legislations, even the informative self-determination which can be found as part of the contractual good faith in the Civil Codex as well as in the Code of Consumer Protection. In essence, there is nothing new in a deep juridical perspective..

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