Brazilian groups call for ban on facial recognition

Brazil is operating facial recognition for law enforcement and public security without meeting minimum standards of transparency, according to a new report.

The “Viligância Por Lentes Opacas” or “Surveillance Through Opaque Lenses: mapping the transparency and accountability of facial recognition projects in Brazil” seeks to take a critical look at the mechanisms of public transparency in the use of facial recognition cameras in public security in all five regions of Brazil.

The systematic study was a collaboration between the Center for Security and Citizenship Studies (CESeC) and the Public Policy and Internet Laboratory (Lapin), and measured degrees of active and passive transparency in 50 cases of facial recognition use.

“The results are alarming,” the authors wrote. “Most of these projects operate without meeting the minimum standards of transparency, which should be a basic requirement in any democracy.”

CESeC has monitored the use of facial recognition in public security since the beginning of their large-scale deployment in Brazil. In 2019, the organization revealed that 90 percent of people arrested using facial recognition, who were accused of crimes that didn’t involve the use of violence, were Black.

From this the Panoptico project was created, which has been studying facial recognition projects in Brazilian public security since 2020, and for which members of the public can contribute.

“We are dealing with a technology that has proven to be risky, facilitating mass surveillance of the population through a racially and gender-biased lens,” the new report asserts.

The report authors point to a lack of detailed and easily accessible information about the use of facial recognition in Brazil, how it is operated and budgeted. “More than 70 percent of the projects do not provide information on the method of acquisition and around 80 percent do not have impact reports,” the authors contend.

The report seeks to build a transparency index, using several steps, and ranked 50 different facial recognition projects across Brazil related to public security according to the newly created index. Suffice to say, it found low transparency across the board. For example, 80 percent of agencies did not provide information regarding the number of people arrested using facial recognition.

Among the states that did provide the data, Bahia stood out with 1,750 people arrested in the past six years, the highest number of arrests using the technology. More than half of these arrests were related to minor crimes, the report said, such as for theft and failure to pay child support.

Elsewhere, the study inquired agencies over the number of false positives and identification errors in the use of facial recognition. Most agencies did not provide any information while others referred to “confidential” information when probed further for the number of false positives.

“This lack of data reveals a worrying scenario regarding the use of facial recognition in policing, especially because there is ambiguity regarding the existence or not of such data,” the report said, pointing to how technology rarely has 100 percent accuracy rates and that errors in this field can result in human rights violations. If such data was more transparent, efficiency could be measured and lead to improved public security policy, the report noted.

“Surveillance Through Opaque Lenses” also lists the companies that provide facial recognition in Brazil. The report concludes that the Brazilian public does not have enough information about how the technologies work, the costs involved, the suppliers hired, and the effectiveness of the tools in reducing crime. The authors called for the use of facial recognition technologies, and especially in public security activities, to be banned in Brazil.

The report echoes another recent call for a ban by a group of Brazilian rights organizations.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  Brazil  |  data privacy  |  facial recognition  |  police  |  video surveillance