TEDIC

TEDIC — La Asociación de Tecnología, Educación, Desarrollo, Investigación, Comunicación — is the Paraguayan civil-society organisation whose mandate is the defence of digital rights and the promotion of a free culture on the Paraguayan and Latin American internet. The organisation describes itself, in its own FAQ framing, as "a civil society organization working on the defense of digital rights and a free culture, online and offline", with a programme working across privacy and personal data, freedom of expression and open culture, access to information and democracy, gender and digital inclusion, emerging and disruptive technologies, and labour and the digital economy. TEDIC is the Paraguayan national-level anchor inside the wider Latin American digital-rights field and the corpus's first entry from Paraguay; its work in the make-AI-good register sits primarily on biometric mass-surveillance and facial-recognition deployments by the Paraguayan state, on the regulation of biometric data inside Paraguay's electoral system, and on the multi-year effort to give Paraguay a comprehensive personal-data-protection law as the precondition for any responsible Paraguayan AI public policy.

Founding and structure

TEDIC was founded on 26 March 2012 in Asunción as a small civil-society initiative that, by the organisation's own retrospective account, "started in the courtyard of a hostel in downtown Asunción". It was registered as a non-profit asociación con capacidad restringida (association with restricted capacity) by act No. 246, folio 3059, of 3 April 2012. The earliest organisational register was on free culture, Creative Commons licensing, and access-to-knowledge work, with civic-technology micro-grant projects added in the mid-2010s and a strategic shift in 2015 onward toward integrated strategic action lines combining both threads. Maricarmen Sequera — a Paraguayan lawyer who was part of the founding team — became co-director two years after the organisation's creation, assumed its presidency, and continues to serve as Executive Director; she was recognised in the Tech Diplomacy Global 50 Award in 2025. The organisation states that almost all of its co-founders remain on its Board of Directors, and operates under annual independent external audit by an international firm and tax oversight from the Paraguayan tax authority (SET) and the financial-intelligence body Seprelad, with international-cooperation project funding declared as its principal revenue source. TEDIC formally joined the Association for Progressive Communications network in October 2019 and is the named Paraguayan member of the Al Sur eleven-organisation Latin American and Caribbean digital-rights consortium, alongside Fundación Karisma, Derechos Digitales, R3D, Coding Rights, ADC, CELE, Hiperderecho, IDEC, IPANDETEC, and InternetLab.

Programme areas

TEDIC organises its work across six programme lines — Privacy and Personal Data; Freedom of Expression and Free Culture; Access to Information and Democracy; Gender and Digital Inclusion; Disruptive Technologies and Citizen Participation; and Work and the Digital Economy — and combines original research, public-policy advocacy in the Paraguayan Congress, strategic litigation, civic-technology development, digital-security training, and standing coalition work with international partners. The organisation reports producing 51 qualitative and quantitative research projects in its first decade, including thematic series on digital gender-based violence in Paraguay, technology and elections (a five-investigation cycle), and cryptocurrency policy, and has trained more than 1,000 people in digital security since 2015 and incubated more than 20 partner organisations and digital media outlets. Three of its longest-running civic-technology projects — Antipyrawebs (a Latin American internet-rights observatory), Defensores (a reporting platform for torture and abuse in Paraguayan police facilities), and El Avizor — continue as standing institutional infrastructure alongside more than 30 named campaigns.

Pyrawebs and the 2015 data-retention victory

TEDIC's first nationally decisive piece of public-interest work was the #Pyrawebs campaign of 2014–2015 against a Paraguayan Senate bill that would have compelled Internet service providers to retain the communications metadata and location data of every Paraguayan internet user for twelve months. The campaign's tag — pyrawebs, the digital version of pyragües, the Stroessner-era informers (1954–1989) who monitored civilians' movements, meetings, political preferences, and religious beliefs — anchored the bill in the political memory of the Paraguayan post-dictatorship transition, and the campaign was carried in coalition with Amnesty International Paraguay, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (whose international rights director Katitza Rodríguez worked with Maricarmen Sequera on the technical and constitutional analysis), and Access Now (whose Latin American policy lead Javier Palleros joined the coordinated response). The Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies unanimously rejected the bill in March 2015 and the Senate followed in June 2015, with the organisation framing the win as a "complete rejection of the law against traffic data retention" and the foundational case study for its subsequent advocacy posture against state expansions of communications-surveillance authority. The campaign also produced a second institutional output that TEDIC continues to cite: the 2017 presidential veto of Law No. 5883/2017 on fingerprint-based activation of pre-paid mobile services, a parallel data-collection regime that the organisation read as a back-door return of Pyrawebs by biometric means.

"Not With My Face" and the facial-recognition mapping

TEDIC's principal active line of make-AI-good–register work is its standing campaign against the Paraguayan state's facial-recognition deployment, launched as "Not With My Face" / "No con mi cara" and culminating in the organisation's 29 April 2025 investigation publication. The investigation mapped facial-recognition deployments across thirteen named Paraguayan state institutions — the National Administration of Navigation and Ports (ANNP), the National Directorate of Migration, the governorships of Itapúa, Presidente Hayes, Boquerón, and Caaguazú, the Municipality of Paraguarí, the Chamber of Senators, the National Directorate of Civil Aeronautics (DINAC), the Ministry of Finance, the National Anti-Drug Secretariat (SENAD), the Ministry of Justice, and the Yacyretá Binational Entity — and documented that the National Police had acquired 154 cameras in 2018 of which 44 carried facial-recognition capability, while across the four-year window from 2019 to 2023 the system had issued only 137 alerts in total, with a single alert in 2023. The same investigation traced 27 CONATEL contracts awarded through the Universal Service Fund (USF) between 2011 and 2022 toward camera and facial-recognition infrastructure, and the Biometric Update international coverage of the report summarised TEDIC's findings as ambiguous privacy and personal-data outcomes, a lack of tender-process transparency creating "conducive" conditions for corruption, and acquisition occurring without an adequate legal framework. TEDIC's three named public demands — suspension of all facial-recognition use until a robust personal-data-protection law is enacted, investigation of public-funds misuse particularly inside the USF, and guaranteed public access to all contracts, agreements, and procurement processes — frame the campaign as both a data-protection case and a public-finance-accountability case, and the work has been carried in collaboration with the Alliance for Affordable Internet and the Internet Society. TEDIC's strategic-litigation track on facial recognition was first registered with APC as initiated in 2018 and re-opened in 2023; the campaign also intersected with the 2024 Paraguayan Sports Violence Law, which TEDIC reads as cover for the formal authorisation of facial-recognition deployment at football stadiums.

Electoral biometrics and algorithmic-accountability work

Parallel to the facial-recognition campaign, TEDIC has been the principal civil-society voice opposing the proposed introduction of biometric voting into Paraguay's electoral system. The organisation's 24 October 2019 analysis of a Senate bill — co-sponsored by senators Fidel Zavala, Stephan Rasmussen, Patrick Kemper, Antonio Apuril, and Georgia María Arrúa — argued that the bill violated Paraguayan constitutional protections of voting secrecy and privacy, that no prior data-protection impact assessment had been conducted, and that only Venezuela and partial Brazilian deployments use biometric voting at the national scale globally while the European Union does not, and cited research demonstrating more-than-60-percent positive acceptance of gelatin-fingerprint cloning across eleven biometric identification systems. TEDIC named the Tribunal Superior de Justicia Electoral (TSJE), the Co-Directorate of the Electoral Registry, and the National Police identification departments as the state actors whose data-handling practices the bill would have implicated, and read the underlying structural risk as inseparable from the absence of a comprehensive Paraguayan personal-data-protection law. The campaign's institutional output sits inside TEDIC's broader algorithmic-accountability line — the EXLILA bilateral research project with Derechos Digitales on Latin American algorithmic-accountability practice, the Data.cuenta documentation platform for technology-related violence, and Cyborgfeministas's standing gender-and-technology programme — and reflects the organisation's posture that biometric and algorithmic state systems cannot be sequenced ahead of the data-protection legal infrastructure they presuppose.

Personal-data-protection law and the Coalición de Datos Personales

TEDIC is the convening civil-society organisation behind the Coalición de Datos Personales, a multi-stakeholder coalition pressing for a comprehensive personal-data-protection law in Paraguay. The work has run in two named grant cycles supported by Iniciativa Latinoamericana por los Datos Abiertos (IndeLA): a 2019 grant that established the Coalition's inter-sectoral table, ran twelve expert legislator-talk sessions averaging 40–45 attendees, presented strategic-litigation tracks, and secured approval for a digital-rights legal clinic at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción School of Law; and a 2021 grant supporting an explicit legislative-debate push titled "The importance of personal data protection in Paraguay: actions from various fronts", which framed the work as enriching the legislative debate "in pursuit of a comprehensive personal data protection law in Paraguay, involving various public and private actors" through legislator talks, print and digital legislator guides, a second edition of the legal clinic, and digital-awareness campaigns. The coalition work is positioned by TEDIC as the necessary precondition for the country's biometric, AI, and algorithmic-accountability work — without an enforceable Paraguayan data-protection law, the organisation argues, neither the facial-recognition demands nor the electoral-biometric critique can be carried into binding constraints on state behaviour.

Coalitions and posture in the movement

TEDIC sits inside several overlapping Latin American and global civil-society networks. As the Paraguayan member of Al Sur, it coordinates with the other ten Spanish-speaking and Lusophone digital-rights organisations of the consortium on regional thematic work including artificial intelligence, surveillance, personal data, cybersecurity, intermediary liability, and access; as an APC member since October 2019, it participates in the global feminist-internet-principles work and the APC technical and policy programmes; as a Privacy International partner, it co-authors joint stakeholder reports for the Universal Periodic Review process on Paraguay; and the organisation reports being part of more than twenty international and national networks at the time of its tenth-anniversary review, including dedicated coalition work with Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Latin American peers on litigation and campaigning.

TEDIC's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as Paraguay's clearest grassroots-style anchor for civil-rights work against biometric, surveillance, and AI-driven state systems, and as the corpus's first entry of a Southern Cone smaller-country digital-rights organisation outside the Brazilian and Mexican anchors. The organisation's working theory of change — that public power over technology in Paraguay requires sustained domestic research, a legally binding data-protection floor, coalition convening across Paraguayan civil society and the Latin American digital-rights field, strategic litigation on facial-recognition and electoral-biometric deployments, and parallel campaigning against communications-surveillance authorities — is the Paraguayan template for engaging non-specialist publics in shaping how the Paraguayan state buys, deploys, and accounts for technologies of identification, surveillance, and algorithmic decision-making. The Pyrawebs victory and the "Not With My Face" facial-recognition mapping are the two single concrete artefacts the organisation cites most often as evidence that civil-society pressure can move Paraguayan state behaviour on technology, and Maricarmen Sequera's continued leadership across both is the principal Paraguayan voice the corpus tracks on these questions.