An overturn regarding privacy violation in Brazil

By Fábio Graça Sant'Ana, Danneman Siemsen

This number represents almost half of the country's population and it keeps growing, as well as the number of online services, such as e-shopping and internet banking. And likewise in several countries worldwide, social networking has become a phenomenon in Brazil.

An issue of deep concern which is directly related to social networking is online privacy violation. A Brazilian citizen's privacy is protected by the Federal Constitution, under the following provision: “the intimacy, private life, honor and image of the people are inviolable, with assured right to indemnification for material or moral damage resulting from their violation”.

A considerable number of lawsuits involving privacy violation have been brought to Brazilian courts, especially those related to offensive contents and/or those involving pornographic material.

Lawsuits are commonly filed against ISPs, such as Google Brazil, which is responsible for services in connection with Orkut and YouTube. In the last five years, Google was ordered to remove illegal contents, change search results and close email accounts.

Because of the huge governmental battle against child pornography, in 2007 Google threatened to cease its services in Brazil due to alleged technical difficulties in cooperating with the Brazilian authorities, so as to provide with private data that could help to identify those in charge of criminal communities.

Recently, the Superior Court of Justice overturned the understanding of the majority of the Brazilian courts when a Special Appeal was ruled in favor of Google. A lawsuit has been brought by the Brazilian celebrity Xuxa Meneghel against Google pleading to have all links and search results referring to her in connection with the wording ‘pedophilia’ removed.

Xuxa had won in the first instance, however Google appealed the decision alleging in its defense that it had no responsibility for displaying search results based on contents freely available at the internet.

The Superior Court of Justice ruled that search engines such as Google could not be compelled to restrain search results, as they are just a mean of access to contents and not responsible for having them published.

An appeal can still be filed.