Chupadados — Coding Rights's Latin American data-extractivism investigative-storytelling project (2016–ongoing)

Chupadados — Portuguese for "data-suckers" — is the Latin American investigative-storytelling project that Coding Rights co-founders Joana Varon and Natasha Felizi launched in December 2016 to document the massive collection and processing of personal data across Latin American everyday life. Structured around the four sub-areas of CIDADE (city), CASA (house), CORPO (body), and BOLSO (pocket), published trilingually in Portuguese, English, and Spanish, and built around commissioned investigations by Latin American journalists, researchers, and artists in collaboration with regional partners, Chupadados is the corpus's principal sustained Latin American civil-society investigative-storytelling vehicle on data extractivism in everyday life and the case base on which Coding Rights's later AI-and-human-rights work — the Not My A.I. feminist toolkit, the #SaiDaMinhaCara anti-facial-recognition Brazil campaign, and the wider transfeminist-and-decolonial methodological frame Coding Rights brings to AI advocacy — rests on.

Origins and the December 2016 launch

The project was funded by Open Society Foundations at the end of 2015 and the chupadados.codingrights.org site was launched in December 2016, with Joana Varon and Natasha Felizi as the co-founders at Coding Rights's Rio de Janeiro base. The project arrived two years into Coding Rights's existence — the organisation having been founded in 2015 around Joana Varon's longer-running feminist-tech work — and supplied the new organisation's first sustained investigative-storytelling vehicle, distinct from the research-and-advocacy register that anchored the organisation's other lines such as the later Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies and the still-then-future Not My A.I. and #SaiDaMinhaCara projects. The project's name — "data-suckers" — is the substantive frame: technologies of the Latin American everyday are being treated as parasitic extractors of personal data, with the harms falling hardest on the people whose lives those technologies most directly shape.

The four sub-areas and the everyday-life data-extractivism frame

The project's analytical architecture, on the chupadados homepage, divides the field of Latin American everyday-life data extractivism into four anchor domains: CIDADE (city — urban surveillance infrastructure, transit-card data concentration, Olympic-venue surveillance equipment), CASA (house — home monitoring technologies, smart-home devices, internet-connected domestic equipment), CORPO (body — biometric capture, period-tracking apps, dating-app location data, health-data leakage), and BOLSO (pocket — financial tracking, credit-scoring via behavioural surveillance, gendered targeted advertising). Each sub-area anchors a published cluster of investigations — short-form articles paired with hand-illustrated infographics in Coding Rights's distinctive colourful, non-surveillance visual register — and each is treated, in the project's own framing, as a concrete operational site where data-extractivist, surveillance-capitalism, and (in Coding Rights's wider analytical vocabulary) data-colonialism dynamics meet the texture of Latin American daily life. The project's stated impact theory is to "make concepts like privacy, big data and surveillance in everyday life more accessible" and to "strengthen advocacy strategies to protect data in Latin America" by anchoring the analysis on concrete, situated Latin American cases rather than on abstract privacy doctrine — a move that, in Joana Varon's framing to the LatAm Journalism Review, treats the bright, hand-illustrated visual register itself as part of the political project: "we have tried to treat images in a way that is different from the imagery of surveillance".

Named investigations and the contributor cohort

Across the two phases the project's published-investigation portfolio includes — on the chupadados about page and in the LatAm Journalism Review feature's reporting — "I went hunting surveillance equipment during the Olympic Games" (a Rio de Janeiro Olympic-venue surveillance investigation), "Mother in a click: pregnancy as a jackpot for the Datasucker" (an investigation of pregnancy-data monetisation), "STD(ata): non-consensual data transmission on dating apps" (a dating-app data-flow investigation), "You are seeing this because you are…" (a gendered targeted-advertising investigation), the menstruapps period-tracking investigation published in partnership with the Brazilian news site Nexo, an Argentine election-surveillance-cameras investigation, the Rio de Janeiro transit-card data-concentration investigation, and a credit-scoring-via-behavioural-surveillance investigation. The contributor cohort — named on the chupadados about page — includes Dia Kayyali, Fernanda Távora, Flavio Siqueira, Igor Natusch, Joana Varon, Larissa Ribeiro, Leandro Demori, Lucas Teixeira, Natália Zuazo, Natasha Felizi, Raquel Rennó, and Tati Dias, with case coverage spanning Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. The investigative-journalism mode (commissioned authors writing situated long-form investigations rather than Coding Rights researchers writing in-house policy papers) is the project's structural signature: Chupadados is the vehicle through which Coding Rights enrols Latin American journalists, academics, and artists into a shared Latin-American-regional data-rights investigative practice.

Phase 2 and the Derechos Digitales partnership

Phase 2 of the project — coordinated by Joana Varon and Tati Dias at Coding Rights, with Derechos Digitales as the named co-supporter alongside the original Open Society Foundations seed funding — extended Chupadados into the wider Latin American digital-rights field, with Datalabe, Derechos Digitales, IDEC, Fundación Karisma, Privacy International, and Tactical Tech Collective named as partner organisations in the LatAm Journalism Review feature. The partnership architecture is the substantive shape that distinguishes Chupadados from a single-organisation publication: the project routes Coding Rights's investigative-storytelling methodology into the parallel registers of Derechos Digitales's Chilean / Spanish-language regional-advocacy work, Fundación Karisma's Colombian digital-rights position, IDEC's Brazilian consumer-protection register, and Privacy International's transnational privacy-and-surveillance work, while keeping the trilingual Portuguese/English/Spanish framing that allows the resulting investigations to circulate across the whole Latin American region rather than only inside national digital-rights audiences. The partnership cohort also overlaps substantially with what later consolidated into the Al Sur consortium, the eleven-organisation Latin American civil-society network that Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, and Karisma are all members of and whose AI thematic area Chupadados anchored some of the earliest investigative case material for.

Recognition: FRIDA 2017 Award and the wider field

In 2017 Coding Rights received the FRIDA Award to Women in Technology — the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry's annual recognition programme — for what the citation described as Coding Rights's "outstanding efforts to integrate a gender vision in the digital rights debate", with Chupadados the principal project anchoring the recognition. Coding Rights promoter Danae Tapia, in the LACNIC article, described the project's purpose as to "banish the presence of patriarchal societies from online environments and to enforce the rights of all people, particularly women and LGBTTQI", and noted that "peer recognition makes us feel that we are on the right track and legitimizes feminist action within the context of digital innovation". The award is the Chupadados-era external recognition that anchored Coding Rights's regional standing in the years before its Latin American digital-rights and Al Sur participation, its Privacy International partner relationship, and its later trans-and-AI work consolidated the organisation as a Latin American feminist-tech anchor.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

Chupadados matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on three connected counts. First, it is the corpus's only sustained Latin American civil-society investigative-storytelling vehicle on data extractivism in everyday life — the closest peer in shape is the broader investigative-journalism strand of the La Quadrature du Net CAF litigation work and the public-tracker-and-press-coverage strand of the Internet Freedom Foundation Project Panoptic, but neither of those operates on Chupadados's commissioned-Latin-American-journalists-and-artists, four-anchor-domain, trilingual editorial architecture. Second, it is the case base on which Coding Rights's later AI-and-human-rights work rests: the four sub-areas (city, house, body, pocket) and the underlying data-colonialism frame anchor the Not My A.I. feminist toolkit's analysis of AI deployment in Latin American public services, the #SaiDaMinhaCara anti-facial-recognition Brazil campaign's Latin-American-civil-rights framing of biometric mass surveillance, and the wider transfeminist-and-decolonial methodological frame Coding Rights carries into AI policy advocacy across the Al Sur consortium and other Latin American venues. Third, the project's deliberately non-surveillance visual register — hand-illustrated, brightly coloured, and refusing the dominant black-and-white surveillance-camera aesthetic in which data-extractivism is conventionally pictured — is, in Joana Varon's framing, itself the political move: "we have tried to treat images in a way that is different from the imagery of surveillance". The aesthetic choice is the substantive thread that runs from Chupadados forward into the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies card-deck workshop tool and the Coding Rights creative-storytelling register more generally, and is the corpus's clearest Latin American articulation of the proposition that the imaginative work of making AI and data extractivism legible to non-technical publics is itself part of the political project of making AI broadly beneficial.