2024-01-28 10:00:40
While waiting for a train at the station, walking down the street or relaxing on a beach, you may be watched by security cameras, which send images directly to a police control center. There, a computer program accesses the database with faces of criminal suspects and compares them with camera images. What seems like a science fiction script has been a reality for some time in different parts of the country, where facial recognition systems have been increasingly used in public security.
The most recent case was the adoption of public transport concessionaires in Rio de Janeiro to technology controlled by the Military Police. More than 1,000 cameras positioned at stations and roads are now available for the corporation’s work.
While authorities defend the measure as effective in combating crime, human rights and security experts point out the risks of increasing racism and deprivation of liberty.
Horrara Moreira is a lawyer and coordinator of the Take My Face from Your Mira campaign, which defends the “total ban on the use of digital facial recognition technologies in public security in Brazil”. She says that the first problem to be considered is the occurrence of mistaken arrests.
Horrara Moreira, lawyer and coordinator of the Take My Face from Your Mira campaign – Photo: Personal Archive
“There is the problem of identification, when an error occurs in the biometric information of the face and in comparing it with the database. And there are errors arising from the procedures of the justice system itself, such as arrest warrants that are expired or have already been served”, warns Horrara.
What if it were possible to improve the available technologies, to the point of practically eliminating the number of errors? Even so, Horrara claims that it would not prevent another serious problem, the inherently racist characteristic of the system.
“Many facial recognition technologies use artificial intelligence as a mathematical processing rule. She may be from deep learning or of machine learning, in which you provide a database in advance, so that it can learn to identify people’s faces in general. And you also need to define criteria for who is male, female, white, black, and teach the machine to identify these patterns. Any bias in this machine training will influence the accuracy rate. And the training is not transparent. If I give the machine more information about black people, it may indicate that black people commit more crimes than white people”, says the lawyer.
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Thalita Lima coordinates Panóptico, a project on facial recognition at the Center for the Study of Security and Citizenship (CESeC). She argues that technology does not produce a significant impact on reducing crime and cites the examples of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro to corroborate the argument.
Thalita Lima, coordinator of Panóptico, a project on facial recognition at CESeC – Photo: Personal Archive
“The state that used facial recognition the most in Brazil was Bahia, where more than 60 municipalities have already adopted it as a public security measure. Salvador is permeated by cameras that use this technology. And a study by Panóptico shows that between 2019 and 2022, the criminal rates of robbing passers-by and attacks on life did not change significantly”, says Thalita.
“Just like in the study on Rio de Janeiro, from a pilot project that took place in 2019 in Copacabana and Maracanã, when it was found that crime increased. Public security involves measures that are much more structural than simply adopting facial recognition cameras”, adds Thalita.
The researcher emphasizes that it is also necessary to be alert to the expansion of surveillance over the population. In moral and political terms, what are the risks to privacy and the right to free movement in cities?
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“We have surveillance on an expanded scale in environments with large circulation of people, and we need to analyze which other layers of rights will be made more flexible. Not only the right to move around, the right to mobility, the right to the city, to spaces where one can move around and not run the risk of being approached wrongly, but it is also necessary to protect the right to privacy and free expression in these spaces. In Brazil, the use of this technology has increasingly increased without reflecting on the risks and without reporting its impact,” he says.
The report from Brazil Agency contacted the governments of the states of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, mentioned in the article, so that they could present more data and information about the facial recognition system. But he has not received a response so far.
With information from the Brasil agency
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