Last June 26th, Privacy Tools held another free online event in the “Privacy Above All” series, addressing a very topical issue in the current climate: Social networks and their effects on privacy and personal data protection issues.

The event featured a presentation by Ana Guimarães, from Privacy Tools, welcomed three experts from the field as guests: Julia Lonardoni Ramos, from Peck + Advogados,

Taynara Rodrigues, from DataGuide, and Renato Leite, from Data Privacy.

The event began with the guests making their introductions, followed by a lecture by Julia Lonardoni on the topic.

"We know that today social media is a large, open database where everyone posts excessive information about their lives, and often we don't know the risks this poses to the individual; risks to freedom, "to privacy, to free development."

Check out the highlights of the chat below.

"When a person posts information on their social media, they might share details about their health situation, or express political opinions, especially sensitive data related to political opinions and health."

We consider this as sensitive personal data, and we also understand, according to paragraph 12, that the behavioral profile and consumption profile of the data subject will also be considered personal data, and that is why we need to... "governance in this," says Julia.

Ana begins the round of questions by asking Julia what precautions companies should take regarding privacy and data protection in their advertising campaigns, and Julia then replies:

"When we're sending out marketing emails, or when we're doing telemarketing, when we contact the recipient, whether by message or otherwise, we give them the option to unsubscribe and no longer receive these emails." That's the company's communication. It's also very important, when we're going to do this, that there's a legal basis that legitimizes that treatment."

 Ana continues the discussion by asking Taynara what best practices can be implemented to ensure that users have the option to choose whether or not to share their information.

Taynara then says: "When we talk about social media and user dynamics, we're already starting from the premise of a completely unequal relationship, but some measures can indeed help move towards a more egalitarian relationship."

"And especially on this sensitive point, which concerns the sharing of people's data, something that has already involved some social media networks in major scandals."

Taynara continues: “The second measure is to further facilitate transparency regarding the sharing of this information. What we can cite here as transparency is the good old privacy policy. And what I would like to highlight here to make it very clear is this knowledge about the eventual sharing or not of political information that is not tied to “legalese” that no user can understand, no ordinary user can understand, or gigantic policies. We easily see more than 50 pages and many social networks out there.”

It's Renato's turn to answer the question sent by the participants, and Ana then asks him about: "To what extent do you believe that social media and these platforms in general can help raise awareness among users who are exposing their data? Should they, for example, include warnings such as 'Caution, this post will be public; do not disclose your personal data and information'? How do you think these platforms can help?" "How can they handle this?".

Renato then explains that some companies already have this awareness of making it easier for the user to understand, and affirms that platforms play an essential role in raising user awareness.

Renato also mentions Twitter's new privacy policy which resembles a game, where the user progresses through levels while learning about the company's privacy policies in a less tedious way.

"Instead of being the 50 pages that Taynara mentioned, the privacy policy was divided into sections of 288 characters. Here in the US, 288 characters is the maximum."

For each message, you can share it in just one tweet. So it's like reading a long tweet with small excerpts, several small words that you can really understand about what data is collected on this platform, what this data is used for, and with which cities it is shared.”, concludes Renato.

Check out all the broadcasts

All previous broadcasts, as well as the full "LGPD and Social Networks" video, are available on the Privacy Tools YouTube channel.