In addition to the fear of being unfairly singled out, public humiliation. The stadium was full, with 10,000 fans who were enjoying, two Sundays ago, the final of a state soccer championship in Brazil. The military police took advantage of the halftime of the match to approach a Confiança fan, João Antônio Trindade Bastos, 23 years old. Right there, in full view of the crowd, several officers with helmets and reflective vests surrounded him, asked him to accompany them and, with his hands behind his back, they took him before the curious gaze of the rest of the stands to the grass and , then, to a small room. Bastos, who works as a personal trainer, had just been identified by a facial recognition system that, like in other Brazilian stadiums, scanned the faces of the entire audience that night in Aracajú (Sergipe state). It was a mistake, he was not the fugitive the uniformed officers were looking for. His case reflects, according to public security specialists, the weaknesses of the system and the racist bias with which he operates.
Brazilians, who have always enthusiastically embraced technological innovations, are embracing facial recognition. These automated systems are spreading at full speed across football fields, streets, massive parties or in residential buildings, dismissing traditional goalkeepers to replace them with remote goals with facial or fingerprint reading and connected to a call center. But, at the same time, there is news of erroneous identifications, like that of Bastos, which in this racially diverse country mainly affects black and mixed-race citizens.
Bastos reported what happened on X, the matter went viral and landed the following Sunday on the most watched journalistic program in Brazil. By then, the governor of Sergipe, Fábio Mitidieri, had suspended the use of this technology because it was not the first failure. It already failed at carnival, when a woman was taken from a crowd that was having fun accused of a crime she never committed.
Specialists attribute these errors to the fact that the algorithms with which they work have been trained with white people, especially men. Political scientist Pablo Nunes, who has been studying the issue for years, has explained these days that “there is a lot of documentation, national and international, that shows that cameras make many mistakes, especially with black people. More specifically, with black women. With them the level of error exceeds 30% while with white men it is less than 1%.” In other words, racist and sexist bias.
While in the Sergipe final the ball was rolling again and the footballers resumed the final, Bastos was interrogated in an office next to the field. “A police officer began to pressure me, saying “Tell the truth” because a facial recognition system had recognized me and there was a prison order against me,” the victim told journalists from Globo’s Fantástica. The agents only began to doubt when they agreed to check his wallet and compared the result of the algorithm with his identity card. Now free, Bastos returned to the stands. He spent the rest of the second half crying. And, then, he posted a tweet that said “He looks like a fugitive, a criminal, but that one over there, the one being guarded by the police, IS ME.”
He seems like a criminal, an outlaw, but he is being led by the SOU EU police.
Saturday in the final of the championship Sergipano passed a situation that he never imagined that it would be possible and come with shame and indignation to share so that something happens and is not repeated.+ pic.twitter.com/bDsSZSGM75
— Simply João Antônio (@joantoniotb) April 15, 2024
And in a country where insecurity is a major public issue and there are municipal elections in October, facial biometrics has become the new panacea for many Brazilian political leaders. Congress has approved a law so that all stadiums with more than 20,000 spectators implement facial recognition within a year.
The Palmeiras stadium, which is in São Paulo and has capacity for 43,000 fans, is the perfect showcase of the innovative system. The club implemented it a year ago to put an end to illegal entries once and for all. Fans no longer arrive with a paper ticket or even scanned on their cell phone, they just have to put their face in front of a screen to have access to their seat. And, incidentally, the club collaborates with the police. The enormous and valuable information collected by the cameras is sent to the Public Security Secretariat of the Government of São Paulo, which compares it with its databases. Files with thousands of files on suspects, criminals and missing persons.
A drug trafficker wanted for international drug trafficking and who fled after a plane crashed with 400 kilos of drugs lost his passion for football. Arrested when he calmly arrived at a match, he is so far the largest piece hunted thanks to the Palmeiras system, which has served to locate more than 50 people wanted by justice, ultras who were banned from entering the stadium and more than 250 people who were listed as missing.
Some 47 million Brazilians, almost one in five, are potentially under surveillance by facial recognition cameras, according to a report by the Centro de Estudos de Segurança e Cidadania, in Rio. Its authors warn that this technology is advancing in Brazil at great speed and almost without regulation. When a citizen expresses his doubts or reluctance to allow himself to be photographed to enter a building or contract a service, the response is usually that it is what it is. Non-negotiable requirement. Few people seem to care where all that information goes, who keeps it, what they will do with it, and how long they will keep it.
Pioneer in the use of facial recognition cameras at the Salvador carnival in 2019, the state of Bahia is the great Brazilian laboratory of this technology, like the United Kingdom in Europe. Once its use has been consolidated in the capital, it now extends to the municipalities of the impoverished interior. “The goal is to have 15 million Bahians registered,” the then governor and now minister, Rui Costa, boasted a few years ago, according to the aforementioned report. Its authors maintain that the investment, a large contract with the Chinese company Huawei that they estimate is the equivalent of building 300 emergency clinics, “has not had a significant effect on public safety indices.”
They also mention some examples that show a scandalous contradiction: Seabrá, a city of 44,000 inhabitants that practically has no paved streets or sanitation network, is going to receive facial biometric cameras. Bahia is one of the great fiefdoms of the Workers’ Party, which has governed it for 16 years and has just snatched from Rio de Janeiro the leadership in deaths due to trigger-happy police actions.
Evidently, facial recognition cameras have also reached the richest and most populated city, São Paulo, 12 million inhabitants. The implementation of the Smart Sampa program began here months ago, with which the mayor, Ricardo Nunes, from the center-right, has promised to install 20,000 new facial biometric cameras in 18 months. And his plan is to integrate them with many other private devices or those of other institutions that are already operational. The mayor highlighted that the great challenge is to combine data protection with guaranteeing security. And he put the band-aid before the wound: “The ones who should worry are those who break the law, but those who don’t.” [delinquen] “You can not worry,” he recommended to citizens.
That’s what Bastos thought until at halftime of a soccer game in a stadium full of fans he experienced the embarrassment of his life.
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