Proteção de dados em práticas de profiling no setor privado

Abstract

The advent of the Internet and the spread of digital technologies in recent years has resulted in major changes in economic and social relations. Profiling is a kind of personal data processing that is becoming increasingly common in this context, in which a data-based economy arises. This procedure involves the construction of profiles based on the automated analysis of large amounts of data collected about an individual or a group, in order to make decisions regarding the profiled subject. As with most technologies, there are significant gains from its use, especially in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of predictive analytics. However, its unrestricted use can mean important detrimental effects on the development of the individual’s private life, as it allows predictions of behavior or characteristics of a subject that is invasive to their privacy, as well as the discrimination of people subjected to a stereotyped profile. In this sense, the present work aims to identify what should be the legal limits of profiling done by private sector agents, in order to mitigate the problems that result from this type of data processing. Based on the idea proposed by Daniel Solove that there is a bureaucracy in the flow of personal data between private sector actors, there is a need for a control architecture that integrates laws and technologies to significantly change the structures that involve the treatment of information. Therefore, we seek to demonstrate that it is necessary that the laws related to the protection of personal data should create ways to control data at various levels to ensure effective privacy and equality of subjects whose data are used for profiling. In view of the General Data Protection Act, approved in Brazil in 2018, and the General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in the same year in the European Union, it will be examined aspects of the regulations that make up the data control architecture today and that effectively define the legal limits of profiling.