Cities across Latin America are deploying facial recognition despite potential human rights impacts. This suggests that rollouts are motivated by politics and unconcerned with legal implications.
Facial recognition technologies threaten an individual’s right to privacy, and, as a result, their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association. The technologies also undermine the right to non-discrimination and can disrupt judicial due process by challenging the principle of presumption of innocence. Despite these potential infringements on personal rights, a combination of political will and public acceptance, underpinned by an inadequate and peripheral public debate, have facilitated the deployment of facial recognition technologies in Argentina and Brazil, and may be driving adoption across other Latin American nations as well.
The political dimension behind facial recognition deployments tends to be lost when discussions are solely centred on a legal and human rights analysis. The adoption of facial recognition technologies, however, is proving to be just as much a question of politics as it is a question of law. In both Argentina and Brazil, for example, political considerations would appear to be driving the deployment of the technology.
A pragmatic approach to contain the potential harms of facial recognition technologies in Latin America calls for sincere conversations about the political drivers behind its adoption. Public safety concerns and apparent voter acceptance of heavy-handed security policies are playing an important role in driving adoption forward.
The public safety argument invoked by government officials in the deployment of facial recognition appears to have buy-in among the general public, and it is indeed a compelling argument. Latin America is described by regional analysts as having a ‘chronic public security crisis’, with crime and victimization rates on the rise. While cities such as Buenos Aires and São Paulo boast low per head murder rates, public concerns around security tend to carry special weight across the continent’s urban centres – which were home to some 81 per cent of the continent’s population in 2021. Security concerns are legitimate. Anti-crime policies have been an essential tool in containing both everyday criminality – emanating from the marked inequality observed across Latin American cities – and the more severe forms of violence and conflict that are associated with the presence of organized crime.
Public perceptions around personal safety appear to play a significant role in encouraging governments to adopt heavy-handed security policies, such as the deployment of surveillance technologies. In deploying strict security policies, local politicians find a means to cater to voters’ concerns around crime. The adoption of facial recognition has also played well alongside the push by many public officials to transform Latin American urban centres into ‘smart cities’, as state modernization makes for attractive political platforms. This was discernible, for example, in the 2019 mayoral election in Buenos Aires: the incumbent, Rodríguez Larreta, who was re-elected, promised during his campaign to expand the use of facial recognition technologies across the city’s neighbourhoods.
Security concerns feature prominently in opinion polls as a central matter of concern to voters. The Latin America Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University reports that in 2017 nearly half of the region’s population considered crime to be the most pressing problem. This suggests that anti-crime policies are likely to be met with strong public support. In Argentina, for example, in spite of a marked political polarization, public security has been identified as one of the top four issues affecting the country by voters across the political spectrum. In Brazil, not only was Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign boosted by the candidate’s promises to crack down on insecurity (see above), but Bruno Covas also committed to increase the use of surveillance technologies during his successful 2020 campaign to be re-elected as mayor of São Paulo, with the use of drones and the incorporation of 4,240 new cameras across the city for urban monitoring.
Concerns around crime are known to have shifted the ‘Overton window’ in Latin America – that is, the range of policies that the public is willing to accept, even if they infringe the rights of individuals. Starting in the 1980s, the region went through a process of securitization by which the state was empowered ‘to legitimately resort to extraordinary means to guarantee the security of its citizens’. In the early 2000s, several Latin American governments attempted to promote a paradigm shift in anti-crime policies, seeking to place human rights and democracy at the heart of new policy development, and addressing social inequalities to bolster public safety. This shift, however, failed to take hold in the region, and several national security policies still fall short in terms of complying with human rights. On the contrary, Latin America’s widened Overton window seems to support the steady incorporation of surveillance technologies such as facial recognition.
Concerns around crime are known to have shifted the ‘Overton window’ in Latin America – that is, the range of policies that the public is willing to accept, even if they infringe the rights of individuals.
Assessing public perceptions around the use of facial recognition in Argentina and Brazil remains challenging, as there have been no specific polls on the subject in either country. Other than actions initiated by local and international civil society organizations, the lack of mobilization or social protest around the adoption of this technology speaks of the apathy with which the deployments have been met. This inaction suggests a degree of acceptance – or at the very least, ambivalence – about the use of facial recognition technologies. Apathy is likely to be a reflection of the ‘nothing to hide’ mentality, a public position documented by various human rights groups in which individuals are willing to tolerate infringements on privacy guided by the belief that they personally will not be subject to wrongful suspicion. While human rights activists have provided strong arguments about why the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is flawed, it still features prominently in public debates about privacy infringements.
However, the debate is more nuanced. Public opinion on the adoption of technologies such as facial recognition is influenced not only by perceptions around security, but also by citizens’ perceptions around privacy itself. High-profile surveillance cases have had an impact in swaying public opinion against practices that violate the right to privacy. For example, following the disclosures made in 2013 by the US intelligence consultant Edward Snowden, who revealed that the US National Security Agency had placed Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and millions of the country’s citizens under surveillance, an opinion poll conducted by Amnesty International documented a strong opposition to surveillance practices in Brazil. The survey also found that there was a higher tolerance towards surveillance practices when the latter were targeted by the host country at foreign nationals, indicating a higher acceptance of surveillance when related to national security concerns. Specialists on Brazilian politics point out that while there may be public support for strict security policies, as shown by Bolsonaro’s ascent to power in 2019 and the importance assigned to public safety debate during the 2022 election cycle, there is a strong public expectation that human rights be respected in the implementation of such policies. This is indicative of public opinion being both aware of, and reactive to, the trade-offs between privacy and safety.
The key to public acceptance in Latin America appears to hinge on whether technologies such as facial recognition – and related privacy infringements – are perceived to generate benefits for the public and are therefore deemed both necessary and proportionate. A national survey on the use of facial recognition technologies conducted in 2019 by the UK-based Ada Lovelace Institute found that the majority of the UK population (55 per cent) would support government restrictions on the police using facial recognition technology, but nearly half (49 per cent) was prepared to accept it if associated with a clear public benefit, assuming appropriate safeguards were in place.
To develop this level of critical thinking, it is important for countries to engage in a public debate about the use of these technologies, as well as the purported benefits and potential harms which they generate. These conversations require deep consideration about how to craft deployments in a manner that is consistent with human rights standards, striking a balance between the potential benefits for public security and against crime, and the impacts on individual and collective rights. For example, this could entail rolling out facial recognition programmes that minimize data collection on individuals or that guarantee that, whenever data is legitimately collected, it is properly handled to reduce its impact on individual rights.
Public dialogue needs to involve relevant stakeholders, such as policymakers, security forces, legal experts, civil society and academics, but, above all, the general public and those who may be affected by pilots or ongoing developments. In countries where technologies are already in use, transparency and access to information are essential to enable an evidence-based public debate on the effectiveness of public security practices and their impacts on human rights.
