#TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira

#TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira ("Take My Face Out of Your Sights" / "Remove My Face from Your Crosshairs") is the Portuguese-language hashtag, civil-society-coalition slogan, and campaign-name through which the Brazilian demand for a total ban on the use of facial-recognition technologies (FRT) in Brazilian public security has been carried since the campaign's launch at the 12th Brazilian Internet Governance Forum (FIB 12) in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, in late May / early June 2022. The framing operates simultaneously as the campaign's public-rallying hashtag, as the name of the Brazilian civil-society coalition that carries the substantive demand, and as the working register for the published open letter — a single substantive demand, a total ban on FRT in Brazilian public security spanning all government spheres and private contracts with public agencies. The framing's coordinating coalition is the Coalizão Direitos na Rede (CDR, Rights in Network Coalition) — the Brazilian digital-rights-coalition vehicle through which much of Brazil's organised civil-society digital-rights field operates — and the campaign sits in parallel with Coding Rights's #SaiDaMinhaCara state-and-municipal legislative pipeline as the corpus's principal Brazilian-civil-society public-discourse vehicle on the substantive demand for an FRT ban.

Origin

The framing was crystallised by the Coalizão Direitos na Rede and a more-than-thirty-organisation Brazilian civil-society coalition at the 12th Brazilian Internet Governance Forum (FIB 12) in Natal, RN, in late May / early June 2022. CDR's 3 June 2022 launch workshop — titled "Reconhecimento Facial: considerações sobre o banimento desta tecnologia digital no contexto da segurança pública brasileira" — was the campaign's public articulation moment, with state deputy Daniella Monteiro (PSOL/RJ), Pablo Nunes (CESeC), Nina da Hora (PUC-Rio), Ana Gabriela Souza Ferreira (Artigo 19 / Orí Lab), Ingrid Soares (Mattos Filho), and Paulo Victor Melo (UFBA Centre for Communication, Democracy and Citizenship) on the panel, moderated by Raquel Rachid of the Laboratório de Políticas Públicas e Internet (LAPIN) with Janaina Spode rapporteur for CDR. The launch coalition included Coding Rights, MediaLab-UFRJ / Rede Lavits, the Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defence (IDEC), the Centre for Studies on Security and Citizenship (CESeC), LAPIN, AqualtuneLab, the Instituto de Referência Negra Peregum, Uneafro Brasil, and the wider CDR membership — a broader civil-society composition than the four-organisation Brazilian digital-rights-coordination shape of the parallel #SaiDaMinhaCara legislative pipeline.

The framing names the substantive position in the first-person possessive — "take my face out of your sights" — and routes the substantive accusation as a targeting register rather than a privacy or data-protection register. The campaign's open letter — the substantive policy document carried under the slogan — states the working argument directly: "regardless of the safeguards and corrections that could be proposed... this constant, massive, indiscriminate surveillance is – in itself – a violation of people's rights". The five-word verb-phrase has carried the campaign across its principal organising surfaces — the FIB 12 launch, the open letter, the Smart Sampa representation, sub-national legislative engagement work, and the campaign's social-media organising under the @meurostonaobr handle — without rewriting.

What distinguishes the campaign's coalition shape

The campaign's coalition shape is the corpus's clearest documented case of a Brazilian digital-rights campaign that explicitly extends its coalition beyond the digital-rights NGO field into the Black movement, the sex-workers'-rights movement, the informal-street-vendors'-movement, and other movements whose constituencies are disproportionately exposed to Brazilian state and municipal FRT deployment. In the academic peer-reviewed account by Pablo Nunes of CESeC and Mariah Rafaela Silva, the campaign "differs from other national campaigns as it includes a series of other social organisations from the black movement, sex workers' rights movement and informal street vendors movement, among others". The deliberate-coalition-widening move is itself a substantive feature of the framing: the campaign's argument that FRT misidentification in Brazilian public security is a Black-Brazilian civil-rights question, a trans-rights question, and a question of the right to circulate freely in public space carries weight to the degree that the coalition advancing the demand includes the constituencies whose lives are most exposed to the technology's operational deployment.

The campaign's tactical portfolio — also documented in the same academic record — is multi-track and deliberately broad: a published open letter, public-bill mapping across Brazilian states and municipalities, international coordination with civil-society advocacy groups in the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Argentina, and India, work with state and municipal legislators on access-to-information requests, public-hearing organising, mobilisation of public bodies (the Public Defender's Office, the Public Prosecutor's Office, and the National Data Protection Authority), and creative-awareness work including make-up art contests and podcasts. The Internet Policy Review account names the campaign's underlying framing as a "right to the city" register rather than a purely privacy-centred register — a deliberate move from the after-the-fact privacy-violation vocabulary that anchors much European and US biometric-mass-surveillance organising to a before-the-fact public-space-and-mobility vocabulary that asks whether the surveillance architecture is compatible with the use of the city by its inhabitants at all.

Smart Sampa: the campaign's named municipal-FRT challenge

The campaign's clearest single Brazilian-municipal-FRT-deployment intervention is its sustained challenge to the São Paulo municipal Smart Sampa programme — the 20,000-camera city-wide video-surveillance procurement, with FRT capability, that the São Paulo municipal government issued through 2022 and 2023. The campaign opened its Smart Sampa file with the December 2022 note of repudiation against the platform's video-surveillance architecture, signed by the campaign's lead-organisation field on behalf of the wider coalition; on 24 March 2023 the campaign filed a formal representation at the São Paulo Municipal Court of Accounts (Tribunal de Contas do Município de São Paulo, TCM-SP) challenging the procurement, with seven lead filing organisations named on the call to join — LAPIN, CESeC, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AqualtuneLab, Coding Rights, the Instituto de Referência Negra Peregum, and Uneafro Brasil. The Court of Accounts permitted the procurement to proceed in May 2023, and the São Paulo municipal government issued a new public notice for the 20,000-camera procurement that same month; the campaign's challenge nonetheless built the substantive Brazilian public-record case against municipal FRT procurement at the deployment-control layer, in parallel with the legislative-pipeline work carried by the #SaiDaMinhaCara campaign vehicle and complementing the Intercept Brasil August 2023 investigation on the procurement's corruption-flagged contractor history. The Smart Sampa file is the corpus's clearest documented case of a Brazilian civil-society coalition challenging a single municipal FRT procurement through coordinated public-administrative, judicial, and press-investigative tracks under a single coalition framing.

Slogan-and-coalition-name register

#TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira sits inside the corpus's small set of framings where the hashtag, the coalition's name, and the substantive policy slogan operate as a single register — alongside the #KeepItOn coalition framing carried by Access Now and its coalition against state-ordered internet shutdowns, the #BanTheScan framing carried by Amnesty International globally and the Internet Freedom Foundation in India, and the Mexican-civil-society #GobiernoEspía framing on the structurally distinct commercial-spyware question. Where #BanTheScan anchors on an Amnesty-coordinated multi-jurisdiction biometric-surveillance demand carried into India by a grassroots actor, and where the EDRi-coordinated Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative advances the parallel European-civil-society demand against remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces, #TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira anchors on a Brazilian-national CDR-coordinated coalition shape that explicitly extends the campaign's signatory field beyond the digital-rights NGO core into Black-movement, transfeminist, and sex-workers'-rights organisations. The framing's distinctive feature relative to the corpus's existing biometric-surveillance framings is its operation in Portuguese without translation into an Anglosphere coalition register: the campaign carries Brazilian civil-society advocacy on FRT into Brazilian municipal courts, the Brazilian federal AI-regulation track, and Brazilian Portuguese-language press on its own linguistic terms, with English-language counterpart material made available through the campaign's own website for international-civil-society reception rather than as the primary working register.

The framing's structural relationship to the parallel #SaiDaMinhaCara legislative-pipeline is one of complementarity rather than succession: #SaiDaMinhaCara operates as the four-organisation legislative-coordination vehicle that carries the cross-party state-and-municipal legislative pipeline, and #TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira operates as the more-than-thirty-organisation CDR-coordinated public-coalition vehicle that carries the public-discourse and direct-challenge work — the Smart Sampa representation, the international-civil-society linkage, and the Black-movement / transfeminist / sex-workers'-rights extension of the campaign's signatory field. The two campaign registers share the substantive demand (a ban on FRT in Brazilian public security), share several lead organisations (Coding Rights, CESeC, IDEC are present in both), and have been carried forward in parallel through the wider Brazilian civil-society field rather than one replacing the other.

International recognition and downstream travel

In May 2024 the Electronic Privacy Information Center presented the campaign with its International Privacy Champions Award at the CPDP.ai conference in Brussels — EPIC's annual recognition of international civil-society privacy and civil-liberties work, awarded at the CPDP Champion of Freedom ceremony alongside the CNIL-Inria Privacy Protection Award. EPIC's award statement characterised the campaign as having "engaged directly with law enforcement and lawmakers, put out open letters, and created education campaigns about the harms of facial recognition, specifically taking note of facial recognition's particular risk in perpetuating racism", and placed the campaign inside the wider international civil-society privacy-and-civil-liberties field the award convenes. The recognition sits alongside the campaign's continuing federal-track work through the Coalizão Direitos na Rede on the Brazilian AI Bill (PL 2338/2023) — the July 2024 over-fifty-organisation open letter calling for FRT bans in public security to be written into the federal AI-regulation legislation's prohibited-uses list — and Coding Rights's continuing organising work through Brazilian municipal and state legislative engagement, Brazilian academic FRT-research-and-publication output, and the Quem Paga a Conta? investigative series with The Intercept Brasil on Brazilian state FRT procurement.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable across the campaign's organising arcs.

First, the framing names a single, well-defined substantive demand — a total ban on FRT in Brazilian public security — and routes that demand through a coalition shape that explicitly includes the constituencies whose lives are most exposed to the technology's operational deployment. The two-clause Portuguese verb-phrase compactness has let the framing operate in the Brazilian municipal-and-state legislative debate, in the Smart Sampa Court of Accounts representation, in the federal AI-regulation track on PL 2338/2023, in international-civil-society fora including the CPDP.ai conference in Brussels, and in everyday Brazilian Portuguese-language press and social-media organising without rewriting.

Second, the framing's first-person-possessive grammatical shape names the substantive position from which the demand is made — a refusal in the voice of the publics on whom the technology is deployed — and gives the campaign's coalition-widening move its substantive grain. The campaign's argument that FRT misidentification in Brazilian public security is a Black-Brazilian civil-rights question first, a trans-rights question second, and a privacy-and-data-protection question only third is itself the framing's coalition-shape rationale, and the Black-movement, transfeminist, and sex-workers'-rights organisations on the signatory list anchor the substantive claim.

Third, the framing's joint operation as Portuguese-language hashtag, coalition name, and substantive policy demand has built it the same discourse-and-organising double life that adjacent framings of the period — notably #GobiernoEspía, #KeepItOn, and #BanTheScan — have used to consolidate themselves into the global civil-society register. The hashtag function surfaces successive developments in the file on social media as they occur; the coalition-name function supplies the campaign's institutional visibility across Brazilian press, the international civil-society field, and the EPIC International Privacy Champions Award; and the demand-language function carries the framing into the campaign's published open letter, the Smart Sampa representation, the federal AI-regulation track, and the Brazilian sub-national legislative pipeline. The combined shape has converted #TireMeuRostoDaSuaMira from a launch-day FIB 12 banner into the load-bearing Brazilian civil-society coalition register through which the Brazilian demand for a ban on FRT in public security is now organised — the corpus's first Brazilian-anchored Message entry, the Brazilian Portuguese-language counterpart to the Latin American Spanish-language #GobiernoEspía commercial-spyware register, and the substantive coalition register through which the wider international civil-society opposition to police FRT now receives its Brazilian voice.