Illustration by Gilda Martini. Fair use
This article by Catalina Balla, communications director at Derechos Digitales, is published on Global Voices under a media partnership agreement.
In Latin America, surveillance is rarely presented as what it is. More often than not, it is set into motion on the premise of other promises: safety, efficiency, and order. It thus colonizes increasingly quotidian spaces until it no longer seems strange to us. Before, when a facial recognition camera seized our attention, we even questioned it. Today, it is part and parcel of public transport, mass events, and football stadiums.
The advance of these technologies is not occurring as an exception or temporary measure. They are established silently and often without public debate, transparency, or people truly knowing what data is being recorded, who is storing it, or how it can be used later. At best, it is hidden behind individual consent. At worst, it is assumed to be what the people need.
Singing is data, too
In May 2024, over 1.5 million people gathered on Rio de Janeiroโs Copacabana Beach for a free concert byย Madonna. It was a night of celebration, but also one marked by large-scale surveillance, as thousands of agents, drones, and facial recognition cameras were deployed in the name of safety. Derechos Digitales documented the incident and included it in a report for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rightsโ Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression.
The concert surveillance was not limited solely to physical space. According to a media report from Brazil, the Rio de Janeiro Military Police also intensified its social media monitoring as part of its strategy for the event. The so-called โcyber patrolโ was conducted without a clear legal framework that established any specific limits, controls, or supervision mechanisms. The crowd was not just observed by cameras at the beach; their online posts, comments, and other interactions were also tracked.
This problem is not tied to one isolated type of technology. Instead, it lies in how multiple types of technology begin to combine with one another. Cameras, facial recognition, drones, and social media monitoring end up functioning together as part of a system of complete surveillance of public space. And systems like this do not affect everyone equally. In cities like Rio de Janeiro, civil society organizations have been warning for years that the systems established so far tend to reinforce criminalization processes among poverty-stricken and Afro-descendent populations in addition to exerting a stifling effect on those who simply want to participate in public life, protest, or attend a cultural event without feeling like they are being watched constantly.
One year later, when Lady Gaga announced a free concert at the same place, the situation was almost identical. At Derechos Digitales, we decided to act before it began. We published an alert one day before the show, warning that what we had documented before was going to happen again. And it did: 18 security checkpoints with facial recognition in the streets approaching the beach, a biometric surveillance perimeter covering the entire coastal area, nearly 2,000 people potentially scanned. For a show performed by Shakira earlier this year, the surveillance situation was also practically the same, with thousands of agents, drones, and facial recognition cameras connected to the cityโs command center for crowd control.
The people showed up to sing, dance, and be part of the crowd, and they wound up being part of a massive biometric data collection process. No one signed any consent forms before entering. No one chose to participate in that system. They were simply there, celebrating, and that was enough for their faces to be held in a database whose fate, use, and storage time have not been explained by anyone.
City travel has lost its anonymity
In Chile, in 2025, the Transportation Ministry announced a pilot program to incorporate facial recognition as a form of payment in the public transport system. The measure was presented as a user experience improvement to be limited to those who voluntarily signed up. But it also involved a deeper issue: the possibility of permanently connecting the biometric identity of each person with their daily movements. Taking the metro or bus, going to work or home, all of it would cease to be an anonymous act upon its conversion to a data sequence that could be registered, analyzed and potentially repurposed.
Who produced it? What was it for? No one explained. The amendment to the countryโs Personal Data Protection Act was passed months ago, but it will not go into effect until the end of 2026. No authority exists to oversee it yet. Without transparency, limits on data retention, or consent guarantees, simply using a mode of public transportation could equate to handing over oneโs biometric data. This is not to say there necessarily exists an explicit intention to surveil; the system could have been designed without considering its effects.
Derechos Digitales warned about these risks, calling for a stop to the initiative and demonstrating how easily such technology enters public discourse as if it were inevitable. This perception does not form on its own. It is the result of a deliberate narrative that presents surveillance as progress and the act of questioning it as an obstacle to progress.
Watching your favorite sports team has an unexpected price
In Brazil, the same logic used for its concerts has been applied to another space: football matches. On match days for various football clubs, facial recognition is now mandatory for entering stadiums that seat 20,000 people or more. Millions of people are giving away their biometric data as a condition for participating in one of the most deeply ingrained rituals of the region. And again, it is not optional. It is a requirement. The argument in its favor is the same as well: security, i.e., controlling violence, identifying people who pose a risk, ensuring order in spaces where serious incidents have historically occurred.
In practice, though, this involves the creation of massive databases often managed by third parties with little transparency regarding the use, storage, or fate of the data. Brazilโs National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) launched investigations into 23 football clubs after detecting irregularities.
Furthermore, mistakes are made. People have been detained after being incorrectly identified, which has often disproportionately affected Black people. These are not minor technical glitches that the system will correct over time. They are a symptom of a deeper issue: algorithms trained on skewed data that reproduce and amplify historical inequalities, and with real consequences for real people. The security narrative that justifies these systems rarely mentions that this is one of their costs.
Infrastructure no one voted for
Together, what these three examples show is not technology in an isolated sense but as part of systems forming connections between, for example, facial recognition, biometric databases, automated monitoring, and private companies participating in the expansion and management of these technologies on a large scale. Infrastructure like this progresses too rapidly for any regulatory framework to contain it, and disproportionately affects those least able to withstand or question it.
Surveillance records what we do, but it also influences how we do it. It can lead people to doubt before attending a protest. It can cause them to avoid certain places and modify how they get around or relate to others. These effects are not always visible or measurable, but they are sustained, and as time goes by, the texture of public life changes. A feeling emerges that our shared spaces are not truly ours.
What can be done
Once these systems begin to operate without transparency, clear limits, or effective supervision, public debate arrives too late. At Derechos Digitales, we have said many times that technology like facial recognition is one of the most intrusive in existence and that, far from protecting us, such technology puts our fundamental rights at risk.
For people who live in cities where this technology is present, the first form of resistance is to avoid assuming that it is inevitable. Ask what technologies are being used in the spaces we use. Demand that the systems that capture our data be explained, audited, and limited. Support organizations that document these processes and bring them into the public debate. And when the next concert, the next public transport pilot or the next big game announces new security technology, ask questions that rarely appear in the media coverage: Who decided this? When was it decided? Why did no one consult us?
Surveillance becomes a part of the landscape when we do not ask ourselves such questions. The good news is that when we do ask them, the landscape can begin to change.
