As Europe tries to restrict AI technologies at home, systems developed on the continent are being rolled out overseas. Investigate Europe tracks how Europe-made biometric software has embedded itself into Brazil’s education sector – with potential consequences far beyond the classroom.

The teacher opens an app on their phone, holds it up, and takes several photos of the room. Within seconds, the images travel to a cloud server, where a facial-recognition algorithm detects each student’s face, extracts it, and compares it against a database of biometric profiles. The app LRCO Paraná returns a list of names. Students identified in the photos are marked present; those the system does not find are marked absent.

For some students, a false absence is a bureaucratic irritation. For others, it could threaten their family’s access to welfare. In Brazil, eligibility for the Bolsa Família program depends in part on school attendance, and in Paraná such records are now largely generated by an algorithm.

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      2·
      6 days ago

      Teaching system most likely designed to be faulty, government is mainly a mix of communists and profiteers, and Brazil is seemingly a laboratory for all that is bad and is to be applied in the world. 1984-style monitoring doesn’t seem too far-fetched imo.