Brazil's Big Promise

I’m back home in Brazil after a fantastic and illuminating world tour where I learned so much about how nations approach digital identity in fascinatingly different ways. This sort of inspires me to put Brazil’s digital identity challenge under the microscope next…

We have the vision

As we know, Brazil is big, bountiful, bustling. Right now, it’s also an empire of digital initiatives, prolific in laws and regulations, platforms and projects, multiple strategies and policy frameworks to realize the promise of a transformative digital economy for the world’s fifth largest country by size and population.

Brazil has been at it for the longest time, too. As early as 1995, the government had created the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee to guide internet development and security. In 2000, Brazil became the first country to hold elections completely by electronic voting. There’s also an annual Information and Communications Technology Household Survey taking the public pulse on ICTs since 2005, yielding valuable data for digital capacity-building.

According to a 2018 OECD report on Brazil’s digital transformation, the country has made great strides in developing a digital economy and digital government, addressing issues of interoperability, service delivery, data-sharing and data protection. Brazil certainly has the vision in place with a comprehensive policy framework (Digital Governance Strategy, 2016-19; Brazilian Digital Transformation Strategy; Efficient Brazil) and a plethora of action plans, strategies and policy documents, including the e-Ping architecture, which, impressively, establishes standards for interoperability for public-sector institutions.

Sorting out the national identification challenge

However, vision is one thing and implementation, quite another. This abundance of strategies can lead to that old devil of bureaucracy – inefficiency, a constant charge against the Brazilian government (you’ve heard it said – Brazil is wonderful, it’s bureaucracy, not so much). Without close coordination on strategic direction and a razor-sharp focus from the top, the many initiatives on digital transformation threaten to diverge into incoherence.

You can see clearly the government wrestling with this problem with the seriousness it’s attacking the digital identity challenge. There’s a lot at stake here. Recent estimates by the McKinsey Global Institute put the potential for value creation of a basic digital ID in Brazil at a whopping eight percent of GDP in 2030, the highest in a study of seven economies (Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, UK and US). If Brazil is able to implement advanced digital ID systems like those found in developed economies, the value goes up to 13 percent of GDP in 2030, again, topping the country league table.

Brazil is one of those countries squarely behind a vigorous national identification system to provide citizens access to public and private services. ID cards are mandatory to avail of social benefits and exercise political and social rights (Voting, by the way, is also mandatory for those over 18 and under 70).  

However, a country as huge and diverse as Brazil is bound to have an extensive identification structure to address a broad range of citizen needs. And that leads to ID sprawl.

ID: an abundance of state-level systems

On top of the system is the ‘RG,’ or Registro Geral (General Registry), Brazil’s national identity card, or carteira de identidade. The main national civil identification document, it contains the citizen’s name, date of birth, parents’ names, signature and thumbprint.

Because the RG is foundational, other functional IDs have been progressively used for a variety of purposes. There are the CPF (Cadastro de Pessoa Fisica), which is the tax number; the work and social security card, the CTPS (Carteira de Trabalho e Providencia Social), the INSS (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social), or the social security number; and the national insurance number, known as PIS/PASEP (Programa de Integracao Social/Programa de Formacao do Patrimonio do Servidor Publico).

Likewise, there are the voter’s ID and the driver’s license.

These multiple IDs give rise to a complex network of identification schemes, with citizens having to remember around 10 different types of numbers. It’s confusing, to say the least.

State-level issuance complicates matters further. The RG is managed by the Secretariat of Public Security of each of Brazil’s 27 federal jurisdictions (26 states and one federal district). This means it’s conceivable for a person to have two RG numbers, (or, in an extreme case, 27!) issued by two (or, 27) different federated states. What’s more, with the siloed nature of each registry, it’s also possible for two citizens to be sharing the same number.

Moving to a unified, digital ID

A unified ID registry has been in the works since 1997, when Law 9.454 established a Register of Civil Identity (Registro de Identidade Civil, or RIC), giving citizens a unique number to serve as single identification for all public and private interactions. However, for one reason or another, the RIC wasn’t implemented by the federal government until 2010.

By then, digitalization had become a key component of the enterprise, the government having acquired the Automized Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in 2004. Pilot projects testing the scheme were undertaken in small states in 2008, involving the digitalization of ID cards.

In 2017, the Brazilian Senate approved the bill creating the National Civil Identification (ICN), which would merge the biometric database of the electoral register with the CPF and other public registries. ICN is to be overseen by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which had been responsible for the successful implementation of the electronic voting system.

The new National Identity Document (DNI) was presented publicly in 2018, and contains the bearer’s photo, biometrics and his CPF. Access was pilot-tested through a smartphone app. The DNI will be integrated with Brazil Citizen, the single sign-on for public digital services.

Strengthening Brazil’s digital foundations

The hope is that the unified digital ID will provide a clear, secure and sanely singular means of identifying citizens, establishing an enabling digital identity framework to facilitate Brazil’s digital transformation. A single digital identity certainly will support the effectiveness and impact of Brazil’s plenitude of digital initiatives consolidating the many gains it has made on the road to digital progress.

The challenge now is, first, to promote adoption of DNI by the population, while ensuring those without smartphones are not disenfranchised. Another would be to address the inevitable issues of privacy, security and surveillance (recent data breaches include exposing the personal data of patients and retirees).

There’s still a long way to go into this digital journey, it definitely will be interesting, and, perhaps, tortuous.  Excited to see how it unfolds, in any case, and also eager to hear your thoughts!