More than 160 children, some as young as one year old, were placed on Argentina’s national criminal database in the last three years, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW), and their faces were uploaded into Buenos Aires’ city live facial recognition database.
Buenos Aires’ facial recognition has a history of failures, as OneZero reported earlier this year. In 2019, a man named Guillermo Ibarrola was wrongfully detained for six days based on a misentry into CONARC, the national database of citizens wanted for serious crimes.
The new report suggests that even toddlers could be found on the publicly listed database, listed as wanted criminals. The inclusion of children in this criminal database violates international law protecting the privacy of children suspected of crimes.