Threats in the usage of facial recognition technologies for authenticating transgender identities - Privacy International/Coding Rights
This isn't just a myopic USA issue. There's a reason why the top scholars on this topic are from Africa and other locales outside the US.
On the International Transgender Day of Visibility, Mariah Rafaela Silva and Joana Varon authors of the report “Facial recognition in the public sector and trans identities: techno-politics of control, surveillance and threats to gender diversity in their intersectionality of race, class, and territory”, produced by Coding Rights with support from Privacy International, are presenting their main findings. The research mapped harmful threats to transgender and non-binary people by the deployment of facial recognition technologies as a tool to authenticate IDs to access public services in Brazil.
Increasingly, facial recognition technologies have been deployed on the streets, airports, in urban transportation, malls and in a wider variety of public spaces in Brazil. But, even more recently, federal government agencies have been piloting initiatives that use this technology as a tool for verifying identity to access public services. This is an emerging trend with facial recognition being used to authenticate identity in the driver's license, to access information about social security, MEI (Individual Micro Entrepreneur Permit), among many others services that are gradually being incorporated into the governamental app meugov.br.
This trend is likely to accelerate with the implementation of Decree 10,543/2020, which addresses electronic signatures in the federal public administration and establishes a deadline of mid-2021 for Brazilian federal agencies to choose what kind of digital signature they will accept to deal with public service demands digitally. In this scenario, the Brazilian app meugov.br, which uses facial recognition to authenticate identity, has been disseminated by the Digital Government Secretary as the main tool for an “advanced signature”.