TEDIC "Con Mi Cara No" anti-facial-recognition Paraguay campaign (2021–ongoing)

TEDIC's "Con Mi Cara No" ("Not With My Face") campaign is Paraguay's principal civil-society effort to halt the deployment of facial-recognition technology (FRT) by Paraguayan state institutions without a data-protection legal framework — and to close that structural gap through a binding national personal-data-protection law as the precondition for any legitimate FRT use. Rooted in TEDIC's strategic-litigation work on facial recognition that predates 2019, the campaign took its current form through the 2021 legislative coalition push and the formal "Con Mi Cara No" project phase running from November 2022 through December 2023, and has continued through a second phase targeting Paraguay's 2024 Sports Violence Law and the landmark promulgation of Law 7593/2025 on Personal Data Protection in November 2025. As of mid-2026 the campaign is TEDIC's primary line of work in the make-AI-good register and the corpus's sole entry on FRT civil-society resistance in Paraguay or in the broader Southern Cone outside Brazil.

Origins: the 2018 surveillance expansion and TEDIC's first legal challenges

The campaign's substantive roots trace to July 2018, when the National Police, Ministry of Interior, and CONATEL launched a biometric video-surveillance system for Asunción and its metropolitan area — adding 100 new cameras to 800 already installed, with 44 of the 154 National Police cameras carrying facial-recognition capability. The system was expanded across Paraguayan cities reaching Encarnación, San Ignacio, Caaguazú, Coronel Oviedo, and Ciudad del Este, and financed in part through 27 contracts awarded by CONATEL through its Universal Service Fund (FSU) between 2011 and 2022 — a fund whose stated mandate is rural telecommunications access, not urban surveillance infrastructure. TEDIC filed its first injunction against the system in 2018; the court rejected it on national-security grounds without substantive reasoning. In 2019 TEDIC filed an unconstitutionality action against the FRT camera installation, which remained pending as of 2023, and the same year TEDIC published analysis warning against a parallel Paraguayan Senate bill to introduce biometric data into the electoral voting system — placing FRT in public spaces and electoral biometrics as two manifestations of the same structural absence: Paraguay's lack of a comprehensive personal-data-protection law. Maricarmen Sequera, TEDIC's Executive Director, had already named TEDIC's strategic-litigation work on facial recognition as a standing institutional capability when TEDIC joined the APC network in October 2019, establishing the campaign as an organisational commitment before its formal branding.

"Con Mi Cara No": the 2022–2023 campaign phase

The 2021 transition that the campaign's name carries refers to the Coalición de Datos Personales — the multi-stakeholder civil-society coalition TEDIC convenes to advance Paraguay's personal-data-protection law — submitting a comprehensive draft bill to the Paraguayan Congress in April 2021, the first formal legislative vehicle linking the FRT campaign's demands to a binding statutory framework. The formal "Con Mi Cara No" branded campaign launched in November 2022 through a project — funded by Fundación CIRD — titled "Transparency and Accountability of the State on Facial Recognition in Paraguay," which ran through December 2023 and deployed the campaign's public-mobilisation tactics in full. TEDIC's project summary documents: street art designed by graffiti artist and human rights activist Oz Montania on central Asunción streets (14 de agosto and Palma), with protests in parallel; over 1,000 fanzines distributed at events across multiple Paraguayan cities; an open-source FRT simulator allowing users to experience the technology directly; a surveillance-camera mapping platform visualising the deployment geography; a workshop training 30 journalists and communicators in biometrics and privacy; and university workshops at UNVES, Universidad Nacional de Itapúa (Encarnación), and UNE (Villarrica), with participation from student feminist groups and gender-rights organisations. The campaign's social-media footprint reached more than 5,000 people across its first phase. In December 2023 TEDIC filed two new access-to-information cases — Case 2320/2023 against the National Police seeking FRT implementation statistics, and Case 2319/2023 against the Ministry of Interior seeking video-surveillance implementation records — continuing its documented refusal to treat access-to-information denial as final. In October 2023 the campaign received an involuntary external vindication: a 400-gigabyte breach of National Police systems exposed more than four million facial images and biometric civil-registry data, publicly confirming TEDIC's long-standing warnings that FRT deployment without a data-protection legal framework creates irreversible surveillance risks with no corresponding accountability architecture.

The Paraguayan FRT apparatus: thirteen state institutions, 27 procurement contracts

TEDIC's April 2025 investigation — the campaign's most comprehensive public output to date — mapped FRT deployment across thirteen named Paraguayan state institutions: the National Administration of Navigation and Ports (ANNP), the National Directorate of Migration, the Itapúa Governorship, the Municipality of Paraguarí, the Chamber of Senators, the National Directorate of Civil Aeronautics (DINAC), the governorships of Presidente Hayes, Boquerón, and Caaguazú, the Ministry of Finance, the National Anti-Drug Secretariat (SENAD), the Ministry of Justice, and the Yacyretá Binational Entity. The investigation documented that across the four years 2019–2023, the National Police's FRT system — 44 cameras purchased in 2018 — had generated only 137 alerts in total, with a single alert in all of 2023. Biometric Update's international coverage summarised TEDIC's findings as documenting "ambiguous privacy and personal-data outcomes", a lack of tender-process transparency "creating conducive conditions for corruption", and procurement proceeding without an adequate legal framework. The investigation further traced 27 contracts that CONATEL awarded through the Universal Service Fund between 2011 and 2022 — a telecommunications access fund diverted to camera and FRT infrastructure, with the USF misuse framed by TEDIC as a double accountability failure: not only mass surveillance without a legal framework, but a diversion of public funds earmarked for rural internet access toward urban police surveillance. The companion Asunción deployment investigation documented 1,641-plus cameras nationwide as of 2023, and AlSur's regional 2025 report — produced within the consortium that includes TEDIC as the Paraguayan member — placed Paraguay's FRT apparatus within a 15-country, 83-initiative regional study, naming Tecnología, Seguridad y Vigilancia del Paraguay S.R.L. as a key national contractor alongside global FRT suppliers IDEMIA, NEC, Dahua, and Hikvision as the supply-side actors operating in the Latin American market.

The 2024 Sports Violence Law and stadium surveillance

The campaign's second phase was triggered by Law 7269/2024 on Prevention, Control and Eradication of Violence in Sports, promulgated by President Santiago Peña in June 2024, which mandated biometric data collection — including facial-recognition data — at all Paraguayan sporting events. The legislation was preceded by a January 2024 agreement between the Ministry of Interior and the Paraguayan Football Association (APF) to install FRT at football stadiums; the private contractor reported to have won a USD 1.73 million agreement with the National Sports Secretariat in October 2023 was ITTI SAECA (Vázquez Group). TEDIC's analysis characterised the Sports Violence Law as "surveillance, censorship, and punishment" legislation — framing it as cover for the formal authorisation of FRT at football stadiums and a class of population-scale biometric data collection with no data-protection legal architecture, no consent framework, and a procurement record that TEDIC assessed as indicating corruption-risk conditions in the tendering process. The campaign's specific demands in this phase called for making stadium biometric registration voluntary rather than compulsory, for human-rights impact assessment prior to any stadium deployment, and for independent audit of the ITTI SAECA contract. In May 2026 TEDIC launched a new investigation specifically on biometric surveillance and FRT in Paraguayan sporting events, authored by Antonia Bogado Rodas, extending the campaign's research infrastructure into the sports-sector deployment class.

Law 7593/2025: the campaign's foundational demand fulfilled, partially

The most significant structural development in the campaign's arc was the promulgation of Law 7593/2025 on Personal Data Protection in Paraguay in November 2025 — the fulfilment of the foundational demand TEDIC had identified as the precondition for any legitimate Paraguayan FRT governance from the campaign's beginning. The law establishes data-subject rights (access, rectification, erasure, portability), creates the Agencia Nacional de Protección de Datos Personales as the enforcement body, and enters into force in November 2027. TEDIC framed the result as a "collective achievement based on evidence and plural participation" — the culmination of ten years of advocacy by TEDIC and the Coalición de Datos Personales coalition (which also includes INECIP, APADIT, Internet Society Paraguay, Puente, and other members). The qualification is structural: the law is not yet in force, the enforcement agency does not yet exist, and the existing FRT deployments proceed in an interim period before the data-protection framework becomes binding. The campaign's post-2025 work sits inside this gap — advocating that Paraguayan state institutions should apply the law's principles ahead of the mandatory 2027 enforcement date, particularly for FRT deployments already operating without transparency or proportionality safeguards.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The campaign's significance for the wider corpus is threefold. First, it is the corpus's first and only entry on civil-society FRT resistance in Paraguay and the Southern Cone outside Brazil — filling a documented regional gap alongside the Coding Rights #SaiDaMinhaCara Brazil campaign and within the Al Sur consortium that includes TEDIC, Derechos Digitales, Fundación Karisma, and eight other Latin American and Caribbean digital-rights organisations as the regional coordination layer for this class of work. Second, the campaign's architecture is structurally distinct from the corpus's other anti-FRT entries: where the Big Brother Watch UK coalition operates as a parliamentary-and-public-petition vehicle and the EDRi Reclaim Your Face EU Citizens' Initiative worked through EU treaty mechanisms, TEDIC's campaign combines strategic litigation, access-to-information requests, investigative research, public mobilisation, and foundational data-protection law advocacy as a mutually reinforcing system — each track carrying the others when courts reject injunctions on national-security grounds, when FOI requests are refused, or when legislative momentum stalls. Third, the campaign's framing — that FRT in Paraguay is principally a public-finance-accountability failure (USF diversion) and a democratic-oversight failure (procurement without legal framework) rather than primarily a privacy or data-protection violation — is the Paraguayan articulation of a civil-society posture that the Access Now global biometric-surveillance campaign and Privacy International have developed in parallel across multiple jurisdictions, and it is the corpus's clearest example of FRT resistance anchored on public-finance transparency as the entry point for non-specialist publics and parliamentarians in a context where data-protection vocabulary has limited civil-society reach.