Protection of personal data

the rise of a new fundamental right in Brazil

Abstract

The technological revolution and the digital transformation have significantly altered society, their impacts having the power to change the lives of individuals and the social arrangements established until then. In the face of new disruptive technologies, businesses are now driven by a high value-added asset: personal data. The future of the economy and society will be based on data, which is now the fundamental raw material of big tech. With the massive increase in the flow of data, threats to individuals' personal information and private lives have arisen, which has led to the emergence of a new concept of privacy: informational privacy, or the right to informational self-determination. In this context, the right to the protection of personal data emerged, a new right which, despite initially appearing as an extension of the right to privacy, is not to be confused with it, despite the fact that they protect similar values. In Brazil, the right to privacy is a fundamental right guaranteed since the 1988 Federal Constitution, while Data Protection has been gaining ground in recent years, and was consolidated with the advent of Law No. 13,709/2018, in force since September 2020. The purpose of this article is to analyze the importance that data protection has been gaining in the legal, economic and political world, even breaking through to the status of a new fundamental right in several countries around the world, as well as to conjecture about the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution No. 17/2019, which proposes the recognition of data protection as a fundamental right in Brazil, and its consequent insertion in the list of Article 5 of the 1988 Charter, a position that gained strength with the recent decision of the Federal Supreme Court, which in plenary established the understanding for the recognition of the protection of personal data as a fundamental right, which must be guaranteed constitutionally.