How to prepare for Brazil’s new Data Protection Law

In a recent article in the Financial Times, Shoshana Zuboff, writer and professor at Harvard Business School, wrote about a project initiated by the Georgia Institute of Technology in the year 2000, called “Aware Home.” The computer scientists and engineers working on it imagined a perfect symbiosis between humans and their homes, with sensors inserted in objects, clothes, or human bodies themselves, in order to facilitate our lives. The entire dataset (including up-to-date information on health) produced from this project was only to be stored on private computers, in order to ensure the privacy of each user’s information.

Ms. Zuboff fast-forwarded to 2017, looking at a study carried out by University of London scholars on Google’s smart thermostat Nest. The paper said the Nest ecosystem is composed of multiple connected features and applications, each with burdensome terms and conditions and privacy policies, adding up to around 1,000 contracts. If a user does not accept these terms, the functionality and security of the thermostat would be seriously affected, and updates would no longer be available.

“Aware Home is a record of what we have lost and what we must now find again: the rights to know and decide who knows about our lives and our futures. Such rights have been and remain the only possible foundations for human freedom and a functional democratic society,” Ms. Zuboff wrote.

In January 2019, in what could be a response to Ms. Zuboff’s call to...