On April 17, President Jair Bolsonaro forced landline and mobile phone companies to share their customer data to support the production of official statistics in response to the pandemic. In the absence of legal guarantees on data protection, on May 7 the Federal Supreme Court suspended the measure for violating constitutional guarantees on the protection of privacy. In their ruling, the members of the Court observed that, although the situation of ‘public calamity’ requires exceptional measures by the State, it is not possible to carry out an indiscriminate transfer of personal data. The developments are in line with a separate decision to postpone until May 2021 the entry into force of the General Law on Protection of Personal Data that obliges companies and state agencies to follow certain principles in the use of citizens’ information.