Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

The IBGE clarifies some fundamental principles about the adoption of the Provisional Measure no. 954. This Provisional Measure addresses a request from the Ministry of Economy, based on an emergency technical demand from the IBGE. In order to meet the recommendations of social distancing from the Ministry of Health and WHO, the IBGE postponed the Population Census and suspended all the face-to-face surveys on March 17. In order not to compromise the production of indicators and statistics on the economy, and provide a reliable and up-to-date picture of Brazil, the IBGE, like most statistical offices in the world, will have to replace face-to-face data collection of its surveys mainly by a data collection through telephone. To do this, the IBGE needs to access the data – names, telephone numbers and addresses of consumers, either physical or legal persons – from the telephone carriers to carry out its surveys.

The database will be used in the regular IBGE surveys, both in the interviews with enterprises in the economic area and in the social and demographic area. In the case of the Continuous PNAD, these data will contribute to close the data of the first quarter. In PNAD-COVID, a telephone survey complementary to the traditional one, these data will be immediately useful, as they will replace face-to-face interviews by telephone interviews. The survey will back the Brazilian State especially in the areas of health and economy, with relevant data to know the income, employment and unemployment of the Brazilian population, as well as to fight against the pandemic.

The 83 year-old IBGE always adhered to the best international practices and has been strongly committed to the secrecy and confidentiality of the data it produces, manages and uses. The data provided will be handled exclusively at the IBGE premises, in conformity with institutional documents, principles and procedures applied to the production of information, which includes the IBGE´s Policy of Information and Communications Security - POSIC (internal use), IBGE´s Code of Good Practices for Statistics, IBGE´s Code of Professional Ethics of the Public Servant and the IBGE document on Confidentiality: procedures adopted to preserve the secrecy of the individual information in the release of results of the statistical operations, as well as the renowned United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.

In addition to these practices in effect, Law no. 5,534/68 establishes that every natural or legal person, either public or private, under the jurisdiction of the Brazilian law, must provide any information requested by the IBGE, and that such information, in turn, is confidential, will be exclusively used for statistical purposes and cannot be object of certificate nor, under any circumstances, will be used as evidence in any administrative, fiscal or legal process.

It should also be noted that the Provisional Measure complies with all provisions of the General Law of Protection of Personal Data - LGPD and was extensively discussed within the Ministry of Economy to assure the confidentiality of the information involved, as well as to comply with the provisions of the LGPD. Other public offices also supported the Provisional Measure 954. Its subject reflects the analysis of ANATEL and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

Finally, it is important to add that the provision of such data to the IBGE does not allow any monitoring or tracking of carrier users, and is solely intended to carry out the survey by telephone by complementing the sample of the Continuous PNAD.

PNAD-COVID will start the telephone interviews between the end of April and beginning of May. The IBGE relies on the support of the civil society in order to continuously provide data and statistics to back the decision making of the Brazilian State.

IBGE
April 20, 2020