Data privacy concerns rise amid telemarketing and robocall abuse in Brazil

The prevalence of abusive telemarketing and unsolicited WhatsApp messages in Brazil has raised significant concerns regarding data privacy and consumer rights. Experts note that personal information is often shared or sold without authorization, frequently through data brokers who collect and organize personal details for marketing purposes. While marketing itself is legal, the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) and the Consumer Defense Code prohibit excessive, repetitive, or non-consensual contact.

One common phenomenon is the receipt of silent calls, often caused by predictive dialers (robocalls). These automated systems call multiple numbers simultaneously to identify active lines; if no human operator is available when a user answers, the call is disconnected. These calls serve to validate numbers for future commercial prospecting or, in more severe cases, can be used for social engineering and scams.

To mitigate these issues, smartphone users can utilize native tools. Android users can block suspicious numbers or enable spam identification in the Phone app settings, while iOS users can utilize the ‘Silence Unknown Callers’ feature to direct calls from numbers not in their contacts directly to voicemail.