Brazil sparks furore over internet privacy bill A Brazilian draft bill that was originally aimed at enshrining basic rights for internet users has sparked a furore after President Dilma Rousseff added a requirement that online information concerning citizens be kept physically within the country. Brazil's Congress could approve as early as this week legislation known as the Marco Civil that was drawn up to protect freedom of expression and privacy on the web. However, its remit was extended after the revelations by Edward Snowden, former US National Security Agency contractor, that the US spied extensively on Brazil, including on the personal communications of Ms Rousseff and her staff. The additional measure would require companies active in Brazil to duplicate infrastructure offshore by setting up huge data centres in the country. It was immediately attacked by media and internet companies and experts, who said it would be so impractical and expensive to implement that international companies would deny Brazilians many of their services to avoid the requirement of onshore storage. "Brazil is going to be the first country to do something like this and there is a lot of fear it could lead to some sort of "Balkanisation" of the web," said Ronaldo Lemos, a lawyer who helped draft a previous and less controversial version of the bill. Commenting on the changes to the Marco Civil, Google said: "The proposed amendment requiring internet companies to store Brazilian user data in Brazil risks denying Brazilian users access to great services that are provided by US and other international companies." Separately, a group of 47 organisations from 18 countries also lobbied Brazil in a letter to dump the idea. "Cut off from the most innovative and efficient cloud services and the strongest computing power around the world, Brazil risks being unable to develop its tech sector and being uncompetitive in the global economy," the letter said. At the heart of private sector concerns is that the proposal will increase the already high costs of doing business in the country. A study by consultants Frost & Sullivan found that Brazil was the most expensive country in which to build data centres, with each costing an average of $60.9m - compared with $48.7m for Mexico and $43m for the US. Brazil also had the highest taxes, with the total burden averaging nearly 22 per cent of the cost of a data centre versus just 10 per cent in the US. What is more, analysts believe that storing data onshore will contribute almost nothing to security. Ultimately, data no matter where kept are highly likely to be shared across the global internet at some point, opening details up to interception by foreign spies. Storing it in one place may only make it more vulnerable to attack by hackers. Meanwhile, Brazil could face reprisals from other countries if it forces their companies to set up data centres onshore. Despite these potential disadvantages, analysts say the measure is politically attractive to the Rousseff government because it provides a platform on which to stand up to the US and some of its most powerful companies, such as Facebook, while apparently championing the rights of ordinary Brazilians. "Everyone is saying it [the bill] will increase the costs to the consumer, even for Facebook," said Paulo Bernardo, communications minister, defending the bill in Congress this week. But Facebook doesn't charge, so how will it increase costs? In addition, the idea of forcing the private sector to build data centre infrastructure in Brazil plays to the government's interventionist instincts and preference for local content in industry. Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, a global fellow at the Wilson Centre's Brazil Institute, said at a recent seminar that the government should reconsider the costs of such a move, which could be reminiscent of Brazil's disastrous attempt in the 1980s to foster a homegrown computer industry through protectionism. That measure had left Brazil with expensive and obsolete computer technology and "pushed the country into a long period of darkness on innovation," he said. So far, Ms Rousseff is not having it all her own way on the bill, which some of her coalition partners in Congress are opposing on the grounds that it would be too expensive to implement. The dispute has erupted just as Brazil and Germany finally took their complaints about US spying to the UN last week, filing a resolution that would extend a global human rights treaty to include online privacy. Ambassadors of the two countries filed a resolution that would extend a global human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to include online privacy. "We must reaffirm the inherent value of protecting individual privacy," said Antonio Patriota, permanent representative of Brazil to the UN.