In my previous piece, I wrote about totalitarianism, George Orwell, Big Brother, Brazil’s revolutionary Pix payment system, the decline of cash, and the expanding reach of the state’s all-seeing eye. Pix transactions and the obligation for financial institutions to report “significant” operations to the tax authorities — with “significant” defined entirely by the government — are not the only instruments of this new visibility. Perhaps even more important is the CPF.

The CPF (Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas) is Brazil’s central identification number, administered by the Receita Federal. Introduced in 1968 as a bureaucratic tool for income tax administration, it has since evolved into the absolute digital backbone of Brazilian life. What was once a small plastic card tucked into a wallet is now fully digitized and integrated into the new national identity card, the CIN (Carteira de Identidade Nacional). The system is so deeply embedded in society that nearly every Brazilian knows their eleven digits by heart. It is required not only for every official procedure but also as the most common “key” for the lightning-fast Pix payment network. Reciting the number at a checkout counter or typing it into a smartphone has become a reflex — a seamless merging of civic identity and daily consumption.

Through this evolution, the CPF has become the ultimate instrument of state control. It has long been known that life in Brazil is nearly impossible without a CPF, but the dependency has intensified. Today, the number is requested for almost every purchase, creating a level of traceability that has few parallels anywhere in the world.

A comparison with the Low Countries

Belgium has the Rijksregisternummer. It is used by the government, hospitals, and banks — but the idea of a supermarket or clothing store asking for it at the checkout is unthinkable. GDPR explicitly forbids such use for commercial purposes.

The Netherlands has the Burgerservicenummer (BSN). It is strictly reserved for government and healthcare. A retailer is not even allowed to copy or store it. If a Dutch cashier asked for your BSN, you would assume it was a joke or an attempted identity scam.

Brazil is a different universe. The CPF has evolved from a tax number into a universal digital key that logs virtually every economic interaction. The question “CPF na nota?” (“Would you like your CPF on the receipt?”) is heard more often than “Bom dia, tudo bem?” Officially, programs like Nota Fiscal Paulista encourage this by offering small tax refunds or lottery entries. In practice, it gives the tax authority a real-time map of your spending habits. Pharmacies take it even further: you often receive the “real” discount only after providing your CPF. This creates a shadow archive of your medical history and consumption patterns — data that, reportedly, is of great interest to health insurers.

To illustrate: yesterday I bought several (unfortunately expensive) medications at a local pharmacy. The total came to more than R$ 900 (€150). After giving my CPF, the price dropped to R$ 535 (€90).

Without a CPF, you can hardly function. Buying a SIM card, receiving a package from Mercado Livre, creating an account on a delivery app, even reserving a cinema ticket online — everything requires those eleven digits. While much of the world is still debating the privacy implications of website cookies, Brazil has built a system in which the physical world is as traceable as the digital one. In most countries, there is a strict separation between your “civic identity” (government) and your “consumer identity” (retail). In Brazil, that boundary has nearly vanished through the CPF and its integration with Pix. The number has become a sharp camera. The state sees not only what you earn, but also what you do with it. Extracting every last cent of tax revenue becomes effortless.

Credit scoring

The CPF is linked to credit-monitoring institutions such as SPC and Serasa. Because your CPF is recorded with nearly every purchase — and with every missed payment — the government (and the financial sector) maintains a real-time profile of your reliability. A “dirty” CPF (nome sujo) means social exclusion: you cannot sign up for subscriptions, rent an apartment, or, in some cases, even get hired for a job. It is a digital identity in which your moral standing and your financial behavior are inseparable.

Everyone knows who I mean when I refer to Big Brother. But the real executor is the commercial sector. When a pharmacy chain asks for your CPF “to give you a discount,” they are building a medical profile. What happens to that data? In the EU, GDPR would crush such practices instantly. In Brazil, enforcement of the LGPD — the Brazilian privacy law — is still young. There is a real fear that this information will eventually flow to insurers who adjust your premiums because your CPF history shows frequent purchases of medication for a chronic condition.

Resistance

Resistance to this evolution in Brazil is surprisingly muted, almost resigned. In Europe, even minor changes to privacy legislation spark parliamentary debates and lawsuits from civil-rights organizations. In Brazil, the CPF culture is often accepted with a shrug — a “necessary evil” for progress and security.

And it does not stop with pharmacy “blackmail.” In many modern office towers in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, or Salvador, you cannot even enter the elevator without registering your CPF at reception. Your physical movement through private space becomes directly linked to your fiscal identity.

Interestingly, both left and right embrace this digitalization. The left sees it as a tool to combat tax evasion among the wealthy and to distribute social benefits (such as Bolsa Família) more efficiently. The right sees it as a way to streamline government and fight fraud. Civil liberties fall through the cracks. Determined citizens can file complaints with Procon (the consumer-protection agency). If a store refuses to sell a product without a CPF, that is technically illegal (venda casada or discrimination). But pursuing such cases requires time and energy.

And you?

For a non-Brazilian who wants to stay, work, or invest in the country, the CPF is no longer optional — it is an existential requirement. Where a tourist once managed with a passport and some cash, the modern visitor hits a digital wall. Anyone investing in Brazilian real estate or the stock market is immediately absorbed into the system. Since 2025 and 2026, the rules for non-residents have been simplified, but the CPF link is unbreakable. Every rental payment, every dividend, every asset sale is reported in real time to the Receita Federal. The anonymity of the foreign investor no longer exists.

On the other hand

Brazil is a laboratory for the rest of the world. The integration of Pix with the CPF has created an ecosystem where payments are faster and more secure than in Europe. Companies that build on this infrastructure — tax-management software, digital-security platforms — are booming.

For foreign investors, corruption is often the biggest fear. In a system where every centavo is traceable through CPF and Pix, it becomes far harder for dubious partners to siphon off funds. The same “digital camera” that follows the citizen protects the investor from shady intermediaries.

The choice

You can remain outside the system and accept that you will be a “limited” visitor who constantly runs into walls. Or you can embrace the CPF and become a fully transparent citizen in exchange for unprecedented commercial speed and opportunity.

Brazil shows that the future of investing does not lie in avoiding the state, but in integrating seamlessly with its systems. For those accustomed to the relative anonymity of European banking, this is a shock. But for the investor focused on speed and returns, Brazil’s “fiscal lens” may be the most reliable partner they will ever have.

Illustrations AI generated

This section is published in English. More English posts will appear here as this section grows. Interface elements may appear in Dutch because the main publication is bilingual.

Totalitarianism today is held back not by moral restraint, but by geopolitical stalemates, military deterrence, and the fragile balance of global interests. Anyone who believes this makes the world safe is mistaken. George Orwell imagined an all-seeing surveillance society by 1984. He misjudged the date, not the direction. The technology that made his dystopia impossible then is fully functional now. And the way governments deploy it reminds me of a Brazilian who once wrote on X: “If I ever win the Mega Sena, I won’t tell anyone. But there will be signs…”

Those signs are already here — and they grow clearer by the day.

Big Brother

“Big Brother” existed long before the TV show turned it into a spectacle. Rare Earth sang about it in 1971. The reality-show version — a hundred days of cameras, contrived drama, shouting matches, romances and bedsheets — is marketed as a social experiment, a strategic game, a magnifying glass on human behavior. In truth, it is a parade of triviality.

The real Big Brother is the modern state: a government steadily moving toward total visibility of its citizens — deciding what is allowed, what may be said, what may be spent, and what must be surrendered. The boundary between administrative efficiency and structural control is dissolving at high speed.

It echoes the verse in Matthew 22:21, where Jesus, pointing to Caesar’s coin, says: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” The difference today is that Big Brother will soon determine exactly what belongs to Caesar — down to the last cent — using information the citizen no longer even knows is being collected.

Europe: bureaucracy as a buffer — but not for long

In Western Europe, the annual tax return is still seen as a frustrating obligation. Belgium offers a labyrinth of codes, exceptions, and regional rules. The Netherlands has automated much of the process, yet the fear of mistakes or retroactive corrections persists.

However advanced these systems become, the tax return remains a yearly confrontation with the state’s grip on personal finances. Paradoxically, that bureaucratic friction also acts as a buffer: as long as the government does not know everything automatically, a degree of informational asymmetry survives. The citizen knows something the state does not — and that is a form of freedom.

That asymmetry is disappearing rapidly.

Brazil: a technological leap that overtakes the West

Brazil is moving beyond Europe. The Ministry of Finance is now studying the complete abolition of the annual tax return. Not because the state wants to know less — quite the opposite — but because it already knows enough to calculate everything itself.

The country now operates:

- a fully digital banking system

- real-time data exchange between companies and the tax authority

- Pix, one of the world’s most advanced instant-payment systems

- a government eager to automate every administrative process

Four million Brazilians no longer had to file taxes this year. Their refunds were deposited automatically via Pix. The government calls it “taxpayer cashback”. The direction is unmistakable: responsibility shifts from the citizen to the state’s servers.

The price of convenience: a new kind of transparency

What is presented as relief from administrative stress is, in reality, the installation of a digital camera tracking every centavo. The state gains a level of insight far beyond the convenience of a vanished form. It knows what comes in, what goes out, where it originates, where it ends up, and which patterns deviate from the norm.

There is another side: this transparency makes life extremely difficult for fraudsters, corrupt politicians, thieves, and drug traffickers. Money laundering becomes a nightmare in a system where every transaction leaves a trace. Pix has become one of the sharpest fiscal lenses in the world. In this respect, Brazil is ahead of almost everyone.

The fundamental question: where does this end?

For ordinary citizens, the system offers convenience — and unprecedented dependence. And that dependence reaches into the smallest corners of daily life. I now see how even the fate of beggars and street vendors is affected. Almost no one carries cash anymore. Some informal sellers have portable card machines, but many do not. Change was always a problem; now it is nearly nonexistent.

A personal encounter illustrates this. Yesterday a young man approached me with the familiar story: robbed, stranded, everything stolen, staying in an Airbnb, and asking for help. A Pix transfer was useless, he said — his phone had been stolen too. What remains when cash disappears? Beggars outside supermarkets wait helplessly for the rare exception who still carries coins. Most people have only a phone or a card — and often not even that if they didn’t plan to buy anything. Even the most vulnerable — real or not — are being swept along by this digital shift.

For the state, the system offers efficiency — and a power with few remaining limits. For those operating in the shadows, it means the end of anonymity. The question is no longer whether this evolution will continue, but how far it will go — and who will draw the boundaries.

Why none of this should surprise us

None of this should be unexpected. As I wrote elsewhere, it is a misconception that Brazil is technologically behind. The opposite is true: in several domains, the country is far ahead of Europe and North America. What happens here is not an exotic exception but a preview of what others will eventually adopt. Slowly, then inevitably.

Fhotos: AI generated - Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

This section is published in English. More English posts will appear here as this section grows. Interface elements may appear in Dutch because the main publication is bilingual.