Coding Rights

On 21 June 2022 Coding Rights, MediaLab-UFRJ / Rede Lavits, the Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defence (IDEC), and the Centre for Studies on Security and Citizenship (CESeC) published a joint communiqué announcing that more than 50 state and municipal legislators across thirteen Brazilian states and the Federal District had presented bills banning or restricting facial-recognition technology (FRT) in publicly accessible spaces — the public articulation of the #SaiDaMinhaCara ("get out of my face") campaign and the broadest sub-national civil-society and cross-party legislative coalition the corpus has recorded on a Latin American AI-surveillance demand. The campaign's single substantive demand — that FRT be banned in Brazilian public spaces, with state and municipal legislatures the proportionate venue for the sub-national legislative architecture and with the campaign carrying the demand into the federal AI-regulation track in parallel — is the Brazilian anchor of the Latin American civil-society opposition to biometric mass surveillance and the corpus's principal Brazilian campaign vehicle on AI in public security.

Origins and continuity with Coding Rights's longer facial-recognition work

The 2022 campaign vehicle sits inside Coding Rights's longer-running facial-recognition work, which the organisation itself dates back roughly a decade. Joana Varon — who later founded Coding Rights — co-created protestos.org with Artigo 19 in 2014, one of the earliest Brazilian civil-society interventions to flag the imminence of facial-recognition use in public-space CCTV networks; in 2019 Varon participated in a Chamber of Deputies public hearing on facial recognition and interviewed Joy Buolamwini at MIT for the webdocumentary Das Telas aos Corpos, anchoring the campaign's framing on the Gender Shades research finding that FRT systems present the highest error rates on the faces of Black women; in 2020 Mariah Rafaela Silva and Varon co-authored Reconhecimento Facial no Setor Público on the technopolitics of FRT control and the threat to gender diversity in Brazilian public-service contexts; and in 2021 Coding Rights launched the Que Inteligência? project mapping AI implementations in Latin American public-sector deployments. By the time the four lead civil-society organisations consolidated the #SaiDaMinhaCara vehicle in mid-2022, Coding Rights had been working the Brazilian FRT question through research, creative storytelling, and intermittent legislative engagement for the better part of a decade, and the campaign vehicle supplied a single coalition-mode public-facing demand around which all of those lines could now organise. The campaign's substantive evidence base is the Facial Recognition in Brazil: a gender and race-based perspective library item and the threats in the usage of facial-recognition technologies for authenticating transgender identities research line — both already cited as anchors in the Coding Rights organisational entry — together with the body of misidentification cases the campaign's communiqué names from the early years of Brazilian operational deployment.

The 8 December 2021 first bills and the 21 June 2022 communiqué

The campaign's effective legislative origin is 8 December 2021, when State Representative Dani Monteiro (PSOL, Rio de Janeiro) filed the first state-level proposal and Rio City Council Member Reimont (PT) filed the first municipal-level proposal against FRT in publicly accessible spaces. Over the following six months parliamentarians in twelve further jurisdictions filed parallel bills at state, municipal, or federal level — the legislative pipeline that the 21 June 2022 joint communiqué of Coding Rights, MediaLab-UFRJ / Rede Lavits, IDEC, and CESeC publicly articulated as the #SaiDaMinhaCara campaign vehicle. The communiqué named over 50 parliamentarians across all five Brazilian regions — Bahia, Ceará, Espírito Santo, Distrito Federal, Minas Gerais, Pará, Paraná, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Sergipe, and São Paulo — and presented the campaign as a deliberately decentralised legislative architecture, with state and municipal legislatures rather than the federal Congress as the proportionate proximate venue for FRT regulation in a Brazilian polity where most operational FRT deployment is being procured by state and municipal security forces. Among the named legislators carrying the campaign through the chambers were Benedita da Silva at the federal House of Representatives; Hilton Coelho in the Bahia State Assembly; Andreia de Jesus in the Minas Gerais State Assembly; Érica Malunguinho, Isa Penna, and Leci Brandão in the São Paulo State Assembly; Chico Alencar, Lindbergh Farias, Monica Benício, Paulo Pinheiro, and Tarcísio Motta across the Rio de Janeiro state and municipal chambers alongside Dani Monteiro and Reimont; Renata Souza in the Rio de Janeiro State Assembly; and Curitiba Councilwoman Carol Dartora extending the pipeline into the Paraná municipal level. The campaign's working position, in the communiqué's own framing, was that the cross-party reach of the bills — spanning PSOL, PT, and several other parties — was itself the substantive evidence that FRT in public spaces had crossed the threshold at which incremental safeguards could be a sufficient civil-society response.

The substantive case: gender, race, and Brazilian public-security misidentification

The campaign's substantive case is anchored on the same Buolamwini-and-Gebru Gender Shades finding that anchors the Algorithmic Justice League's US-side work — that FRT error rates fall most heavily on the faces of Black women — and is extended in the Brazilian context with the body of operational misidentification cases that the campaign's lead organisations document. Coding Rights's communiqué names three illustrative cases from the early years of Brazilian operational deployment: in Rio de Janeiro, a Black woman was wrongly arrested on the second day of FRT operational testing; in Piauí, a Black man was wrongly imprisoned for three days on the basis of an FRT match; and in Salvador a 25-year-old Black Brazilian with special needs was approached by police after being mistaken for a wanted person. The campaign's framing of these cases is that they are not bugs but the predictable operational consequence of deploying a high-misidentification technology against a Brazilian operational population in which Black Brazilians make up the majority of the country's third-largest-in-the-world incarcerated population and a disproportionate share of police suspect pools, in a context where 56.1% of Brazil's population self-identifies as Black, and that any deployment of FRT in Brazilian public security therefore reinforces pre-existing patterns of racial discrimination in the criminal-justice system rather than supplying a neutral identification capability. The trans-and-non-binary disproportionality argument the campaign carries from Coding Rights's earlier FRT-and-transgender-identities research extends the same case: the higher misidentification rates documented in FRT systems trained on cisnormative facial datasets compound the existing patterns of state surveillance and harassment of trans and non-binary Brazilians, and trans-and-non-binary civil rights are therefore an inseparable part of the campaign's substantive position.

Coalition shape and the four lead civil-society organisations

The campaign's coalition vehicle is structured around four lead Brazilian civil-society organisations, each contributing a distinct methodological pole. Coding Rights — the corpus's Brazilian feminist-tech / transfeminist anchor and the only one of the four to be in the corpus at this writing — supplies the gender-and-race substantive analysis, the trans-rights line, the creative-storytelling work routing the analysis to non-technical publics, and the Latin American regional connective tissue through its Al Sur consortium membership. MediaLab-UFRJ / Rede Lavits — the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro media-and-information-studies hub coordinated with the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology, and Society Studies — supplies the academic-research base on Brazilian surveillance practices. The Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defence (IDEC) supplies the consumer-protection legal architecture and the strategic-litigation track on private-sector FRT deployments. The Centre for Studies on Security and Citizenship (CESeC) supplies the public-security and policing-data analysis. The campaign's working architecture is that none of the four lead organisations exercises sole leadership; the campaign's day-to-day coordination, communications, and parliamentary-engagement work are distributed across the four, with each organisation drawing on its own institutional network of parliamentarians, researchers, and partner civil-society organisations. Within the corpus's framing, Coding Rights is the anchor organisation, and the campaign vehicle is its principal contribution to Brazilian organised civil-society resistance to FRT in public spaces — pairing the Brazilian feminist-tech / transfeminist methodological frame with the multi-state legislative architecture that none of the corpus's other anti-FRT campaign anchors carries.

The ViaQuatro / São Paulo Metro precedent

A complementary strand of Brazilian civil-society FRT opposition that the campaign sits in continuity with is the ViaQuatro / São Paulo Metro litigation. In 2021 the São Paulo State Court ruled against ViaQuatro, the private operator of Line 4 of the São Paulo Metro, for its unauthorised use of FRT — including emotion-recognition technology — on passengers; the court found that passengers' images "were being captured without their consent for commercial purposes that benefit the company and other third-party firms involved" and ordered ViaQuatro to halt the deployment. The ruling — referenced in the #TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira open letter as a Brazilian civil-society precedent — is the campaign's strategic-litigation analogue at the private-sector deployment-control layer, and is the case the campaign's lead organisations cite when arguing that Brazilian courts have the doctrinal architecture to constrain operational FRT deployments where the legislative architecture is still being built.

The 2023 escalation: #TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira

In 2023 the campaign was broadened and consolidated into the #TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira ("take my face out of your sights") open letter — a civil-society demand for a total ban on FRT in Brazilian public security, signed by 66 organisations including Coding Rights, Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Instituto Aaron Swartz, alongside Brazilian digital-rights, feminist, racial-justice, and police-monitoring organisations. Coding Rights co-organised the letter alongside the Coalizão Direitos na Rede (Rights in Network Coalition) and the wider Brazilian civil-society field, and the letter's signature block extended the campaign's coalition shape from a four-organisation legislative-coordination vehicle to a 66-organisation public-demand vehicle while keeping the substantive demand consistent — a total ban on FRT in public security, encompassing all government spheres and private-sector contracts with public agencies. The letter explicitly acknowledges the international context the campaign sits inside: the EDRi-coordinated Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative and Access Now's biometric-surveillance-ban campaigning are named as kindred international initiatives. In parallel, in August 2023 Coding Rights co-organised a Rio de Janeiro state-level seminar with Dani Monteiro on FRT in public security, and produced the Quem Paga a Conta? ("who is footing the bill?") investigative series with The Intercept Brasil examining the public-finance transparency gaps in Brazilian state FRT procurement.

The federal AI Bill PL 2338/2023 and the July 2024 Coalizão Direitos na Rede open letter

The campaign's federal-track work has run through the Coalizão Direitos na Rede on the Brazilian AI Bill (PL 2338/2023), the federal AI-regulation legislation modelled on the EU AI Act and incorporating rights guarantees, prohibited AI uses, algorithmic impact assessments, and civil liability for operators. In July 2024 the Coalizão Direitos na Rede — the over-50-academic-and-civil-society-organisation Brazilian digital-rights coalition that includes Coding Rights and the campaign's wider field — published an open letter calling for a ban on FRT in public security and criminal justice to be written into PL 2338/2023's prohibited-uses list, on the grounds that FRT in public-security deployment is incompatible with freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The Coalizão's letter cited recent operational misidentification cases — including a man wrongly detained at a stadium in Sergipe in April 2024 — and accused private-sector lobbying of attempting to prevent the vote on the bill by introducing late-stage amendments and scheduling additional hearings. The federal AI Bill's final language on FRT in public security remains contested in Senate and Chamber of Deputies negotiations as of 2026, and the campaign's federal-track work sits in continuity with the multi-state legislative architecture #SaiDaMinhaCara originated rather than displacing it.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The campaign matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on three connected counts. First, it is the corpus's only sustained Brazilian civil-society campaign on facial recognition and biometric mass surveillance, and the Latin American counterpart to the corpus's existing UK, EU, and South-Asian anti-FRT campaign vehicles: structurally distinct from the Big Brother Watch UK Stop Live Facial Recognition coalition (single-jurisdiction, single-coalition-statement-and-65-parliamentarians architecture around an immediate-stop demand), from the EDRi-coordinated Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative (EU-wide, signature-collection-and-Treaty-mechanism architecture against remote biometric identification across publicly accessible spaces), and from the Internet Freedom Foundation Project Panoptic (single-national-organisation, public-tracker-and-petition architecture against Indian state FRT procurement), the #SaiDaMinhaCara campaign operates on a four-lead-organisation, multi-state-and-municipal-legislative-pipeline architecture that is the corpus's first instance of a campaign-as-distributed-sub-national-legislative-vehicle anchored on a four-organisation civil-society coordination layer. Second, the campaign closes the corpus's principal Brazilian biometric-surveillance anchor — extending the broader Latin American digital-rights field anchored by Coding Rights and Derechos Digitales into a campaign-vehicle slice, complementing Derechos Digitales's IACHR AI hearing on the supra-national side and giving Coding Rights its first dedicated campaign-entity anchor in the corpus. Third, the campaign's substantive frame — that FRT misidentification in Brazilian public security is a Black-Brazilian civil-rights question first and a privacy or data-protection question second, that the trans-and-non-binary disproportionality compounds the racial disproportionality through cisnormative training-data bias, and that the proportionate civil-society demand is therefore a ban in publicly accessible spaces — is the corpus's principal Latin American articulation of the Buolamwini-and-Gebru Gender Shades finding routed through a Brazilian feminist, queer, and decolonial methodological frame rather than through Global North digital-rights vocabularies, and is the substantive position that the wider Brazilian civil-society opposition to FRT in public security has now organised behind.