IGF 2023 Lightning Talk #94 The technopolitics of face recognition technology

10. Reduced Inequalities
16. Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Targets: Based on public security relations within the scope of urban planning and local governance, the use of surveillance technologies has become a mechanism for repressive control of violence and crime in public and private spaces. The use of video surveillance with face recognition technology enables the location, identification and social classification of individuals, in a constant, systematic and indiscriminate way, and, consequently, makes public spaces hostile environments, violating fundamental rights — which demnstrated the strong links of this proposal with the SGD 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. In this sense, what was shown as a possibility of surveillance for the reduction of urban violence, became a mechanism of violation of rights inherent to the subjects, such as equality and non-discrimination, to the extent that these technologies accompany the segregating and racist realities of the criminal system, making the public environments of local meetings and protests subject to criminalization for the general population. According to a recent study by the Security Observatory Network (2019), 90.5% of people arrested with the use of face recognition in Brazil are black. This reflects the so-called algorithmic racism of these technologies, mainly due to the inaccuracy of the systems and data bases that constitute them. The use of face recognition has been shown to be another mechanism of oppression and mass incarceration of the black, poor and peripheral population — which connects the themes of this session to the SGD 10, Reduced Inequalities.