Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: ‘Big Brother’ from São Paulo wants to know the color of his skin

In recent months, São Paulo City Hall has been working to build a “Big Brother” in the city. His name is also English and wants to be friendly: “Smart Sampa”. However, the public documents published so far for the construction of this complex system have serious and unacceptable errors.

First, it is worth explaining what the project consists of. The city wants to integrate several municipal services that today operate without talking to each other, as they should. Among these services are the CET, the Samu, the Civil Defense and the Municipal Guard. It also wants to install 20,000 additional cameras in the city, complementing those that are already operated by some of these services, but without integration. In practice, he wants to create an “Operations Center” capable of unifying the city’s administration and acting in real time.

Other cities that are a reference in municipal public policies, such as Boston or New York, have already implemented similar projects. São Paulo, as a city that has a vocation for large events and faces the challenge of large-scale municipal management, does well to want to consider the role of technology in public action. However, there are serious problems with what is being proposed.

The first of them is a whole chapter dedicated to the so-called “facial recognition”. In other words, the ability of installed cameras to identify individuals through their faces. This technology is being criticized today globally. There are even proposals for it to be banned or to suffer a moratorium on its implementation.

The reasons for this are many. First, the fact that the technology is embryonic and mainly generates false positives. Furthermore, it increases inequality, serving as a tool to persecute segments of the population that are already victims of institutional violence.

The facial recognition part should be completely banned from the project. Even for containing in its text an atrocity such as the following sentence: “allowing to track a suspicious person, monitoring all his movements and activities, by characteristics such as color, face, clothes, body shape, physical aspects, etc”. Tracking people because of things like skin color is illegal and unconstitutional. A revolting insult.

Furthermore, the cameras would have to be able to detect “loitering”. It is as if the futuristic project of the city of São Paulo had its roots in 1893, when Floriano Peixoto created a legislative decree that authorized the punishment of “vagabonds, vagabonds and capoeiras found in the Federal Capital” with forced labor. Another shameful incident of the project.

Another absurd part is to create a social media monitoring system, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and others. In other words, the city of São Paulo wants to know what you do on social networks in real time, being able to use this against you and analyze each piece of content “by feeling, categorizing each text as positive, neutral or negative”.

What positive the systematic monitoring of social media brings to a municipal management project with cameras is something difficult to understand. In short, a project that wants to be “smart” cannot have so many “dumb” elements.

READER

It’s overfind that easy recognition in cities is a good idea

AlreadyFacial recognition as an embryonic and troubled technology

It’s comingseveral cities banning or putting moratorium on facial recognition