Toddlers Are Being Scooped Up in Buenos Aires’ Live Facial Recognition Dragnet
A new Human Rights Watch report suggests children as young as one are now in the database
More than 160 children, some as young as one year old, were placed on Argentina’s national criminal database in the last three years, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW), and their faces were uploaded into Buenos Aires’ city live facial recognition database.
Buenos Aires’ facial recognition has a history of failures, as OneZero reported earlier this year. In 2019, a man named Guillermo Ibarrola was wrongfully detained for six days based on a misentry into CONARC, the national database of citizens wanted for serious crimes.
The new report suggests that even toddlers could be found on the publicly listed database, listed as wanted criminals. The inclusion of children in this criminal database violates international law protecting the privacy of children suspected of crimes.
In response to the report, the office of Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández told Human Rights Watch that they are temporarily taking down the CONARC database and reviewing it for information that violates international law, according to HRW researcher Hye Jung Han.
“This is an instance of a government that has procured a technology it doesn’t understand and didn’t prepare for the potential harms in the event of errors,” she told OneZero.
To read more about Buenos Aires’ use of live facial recognition, click the link below:
