Child Suspects’ Private Data Published Online

Child Suspects’ Private Data Published Online
Short Title	Child Suspects’ Photos in Argentina Uploaded Into Flawed Facial Recognition System And Other Personal Information Posted Online in a Database
Location	Argentina
Date	October 2020
Solove Harm	Disclosure, Identification
Information	Physical Characteristics, Identifying, Demographic, Behavioral, Criminal
Threat Actors	Law Enforcement, Argentina officials
Individuals
Affected	Child suspects
High Risk Groups	Children, Criminal
Tangible Harms	Incarceration

Argentina’s officials are regularly publishing online the personal data of children with open arrest warrants and uploads their images into a facial recognition system.

Description

Buenos Aires city government has been loading the images and identities of children with open arrest warrants into a facial recognition system used at the city’s train stations, despite significant errors in the national government’s database and the technology’s higher risk of false matches for children. ^{Identification}

Besides that, since 2009, Argentina’s Justice and Human Rights Ministry has maintained a national database of people with outstanding arrest warrants, known as the National Register of Fugitives and Arrests (Consulta Nacional de Rebeldías y Capturas, CONARC). This database, which the ministry makes publicly available online, contains suspects’ names, ages, national ID numbers, the alleged offense, and the location and the authority issuing the warrant, among other details. Children, most of them 16 or 17 years old, are included, although people identified as being as young as one year old have also been included. This can be interpreted as Disclosure.

Breakdown

Threat: Argentina’s officials and law enforcement pointing out child suspects with live facial recognition
At-Risk group: Child suspects
Harm: Identification
Secondary Consequences: Potentially: Incarceration

Threat: Argentina’s officials publishing personal information of people with outstanding arrest warrants online in a publicly available database
At-Risk group: child suspects
Harm: Disclosure
Secondary Consequences: not known