In Brazil companies must have the purchaser's (natural person or company) tax ID for invoicing purposes. Point-of-sale in-person sales transactions don't require invoicing, just receipts, but any other commercial transaction does. Even returning merchandise that was bought with a receipt will require an inbound invoice and a CPF. Thanks tax evaders.

Maybe 30 years ago one could think of their CPF as a number to keep mostly private, but since a large part of the economy now goes through digital channels, a CPF is simply a person identifier rather than something secret.

Nobody trusts CPFs to be a secure identifier anymore. The backstop currently rests on biometric validation on B2C scenarios. For more secure purposes (like contracts) we have digital signatures backed by the gov.br infrastructure, which are widespread but requires acceptance by both parties, and also digital signatures backed by PKI like e-CPF and e-CNPJ that carries full validity by law and are equivalent to notarized signatures. Very few people have e-CPFs though.

To be honest, that information is already out there, people can track you by your full name already. The tech analogy is: CPF is just the primary key id in the Brazilian PERSON database, everyone gets one, and you use it on any API a person is needed (literally and figuratively). It should be public by design, just like a piblic crypto key, or a username handle

So you don't understand. Also not every country is a shithole that knowing even a SSN can result in identity fraud.

You can't vote with just a CPF. The cards aren't issued since 2011, and they didn't have a photo or anything like that. At that time, they were considered tax identifiers only. They moved to printing the CPF number on receipt paper when somebody requested it at the post office when they reached 16-18 years old, usually at the same time when one would request their electoral registration or when requesting an employment booklet. It was a rite of passage to the adult life. More recently all newborns receive a CPF number when they are registered on their birth certificate.

In any case, you have to vote with a photo ID document and you have to scan a fingerprint that was previously enrolled in the electoral justice courts or whenever you renew a driver's license or photo ID. By now 88% of the population have their fingerprints collected for electoral purposes.

In 2023 a law was passed to deprecate state-level ID cards and numbers to use a single federal identifier, and since every economically active person in the country already had a tax ID, the government decided to use the same number.

I do think they cause unnecessary friction for non-residents though, because companies could simply accept passport numbers, as authorized by tax law, but I guess nobody gives this a thought.

they relax this during the f1 weekend. it's kinda of a joke.

already considered a paypal-like service just for foreigners, but then figured criminals would use it instead to evade tax/etc.

so they can setup recurring charges to your card. it's only for financial transactions. get over it.

And then?

So you're OK with ignoring the rule of law and the constitution, which says the states are responsible for public security, and mass encarcerating people without due process in Salvadoran-style prisons?

And the Banco Master investigation (amongst many, many others), which has been happening under Lula's government and has found all kinds of involvement with PCC, doesn't count as going after drug traffickers/criminal organizations?

The phenomenon of PCC and CV being called terrorists only started when Trump gave those groups the terrorist designation, a patently political act, in order to bolster Flavio Bolsonaro's hypothetical/fake claims of being tough on crime and to try and weaken Lula during the campaign.

The Bolsonaro family's ties with organized crime are deep, widely known, and non-controversial at this point. Flavio never, not once denied it when Lula and others called him a miliciano, and the results of the runoff show who Brazilians believe is better equipped to protect Brazil and its citizens.

more violence won't stop drug trafficking

source: 40 years of "war on drugs"

Yeah, and replace them with vigilante militias, that are actually worse.

Putting drug traffickers behind bars or even killing them hasn’t worked. It creates power vacuums that are filled in immediately.

> But at least he was going to go after the drug trafficking terrorists.

Bullshit on that. Also, how isn't he a terrorist? Is arranging 2 bomb attacks not enough?

[dead]

The Nota Fiscal website has three access methods: user/password, digital certificate and gov.br account.

I chose the user/password method, and went through their "first access" flow to set up my account. I was asked for my CPF, birth date and some other tax number I don't remember. That was it.

The "much, much more secure" option literally doesn't matter when I can literally bypass it with birth dates and some other tax minutiae that anyone in my accountant's office can get their hands on.

My most recent interaction with a government website that did this: Nota Fiscal.

Didn't have an account, so I had to go through their "first login" flow where it demanded my CPF, birth date and some other tax number thing I don't quite remember. That's all it takes to "verify" my identity, apparently.

It's a system that rolled out nationwide some time ago. I was forced to migrate to it after my city's nota fiscal system was deprecated. Don't remember if the local system was better or worse: my accountant signed up for it, not me.

Honestly, I don't even want them to fix any of this at this point. If they try, I have no doubt they'll double down on the surveillance and mandate facial recognition instead. And when people inevitably start deep faking it with AI, I have no doubt they'll destroy computer freedom because of it by requiring that everybody be restricted to locked down government approved phones.