alt Hacker NewsNo financial information leaked, just tax id, which in Brazil nowadays doesn't mean much. There have been more than one high profile website in the past reportedly selling personal data, including tax identifier (CPF), for essentially any Brazilian citizen.
It is common to be asked for your CPF for trivial things like purchasing anything on a drugstore, and for any and all activity with government branches or banking. This combined with several breaches in government and private institutions in Brazil over the years has made this information essentially public.
More concerning is when more private information is leaked. For example, police security camera live feed and license plate or CPF-based tracking of anyone was sold online in the past, and has been used by criminal gangs in an attempted murder of a judge: https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/pcc-tinha-acesso-a-siste...
This highlights the importance of reducing the amount of data collected, but in Brazil and the rest of the world, both governments and private institutions have pushed for the contrary, more so in recent years.
Replies
> It is common to be asked for your CPF for trivial things like purchasing anything on a drugstore
I always point out how insane this is to my Brazilian friends but then I, as a foreigner, have to hand over my passport number instead for the same inane things. I ended up getting a Brazilian eSim and now get spam calls all day.
No, this is very serious. Scammers now have a list of people who have/had life insurance with Caixa.
It doesn’t matter if no other information is leaked, the mere fact that you appeared in this list is financial data about you.
Also, Caixa admits the leak affected all of their insurance customers. So even if you are not on the list, scammers now know one more thing about you. This is bad.
lol I just wrote a comment on this thread 3min ago that says basically the same thing and it's funny how we both structured it the same way:
Paragraph 1: All CPFs have already leaked
P2: Even drugstores have your CPF
P3: The problem is if anything else leaks
Brazilian groupthink?
> https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/pcc-tinha-acesso-a-siste...
Learn from Brazil, folks. Brazilian terrorists managed to get access to the mass surveillance system. I literally cannot think of a better argument against mass surveillance.
> both governments and private institutions have pushed for the contrary, more so in recent years.
Yeah...
Brazil in particular will only ever double down on totalitarianism. If people are stepping out of line so brazenly like that, then clearly it's because the boot of the state isn't stepping on their faces hard enough. Lula's government is on the record praising "the chinese model".
Gonna need more surveillance, more data collection, more vague and expansive laws, more judicial activism, more everything.
> just tax id, which in Brazil nowadays doesn't mean much
Fraudsters can go as far as opening bank accounts with that information, take loans an disappear, I don't know what you mean with "doesn't mean much". Not every brazilian is in "BC Protege", which would prevent this.
Also the fact that it has been leaked before does not diminish what has happened here, maybe the new bad actors did not have access to previous information.
> It is common to be asked for your CPF for trivial things like purchasing anything on a drugstore, and for any and all activity with government branches or banking. This combined with several breaches in government and private institutions in Brazil over the years has made this information essentially public.
It is common but it doesn't change the fact that the CPF (social security number) is personally identifiable information and any leak related to it or any use without reason is a breach of the LGPD.