São Paulo's facial-recognition net will double to 100,000 cameras

São Paulo started using facial recognition on its streets in 2024. The system scans for people wanted by police, missing persons, and stolen vehicles, then sends alerts to officers on the ground. Camera feeds come from street corners, health centres, buses and police motorbikes, all streamed to a central control room. The city plans to double the network to 100,000 cameras by 2028, officials said.

Brazilian cities are spending heavily on crime-fighting technology. Body-worn cameras and gunshot-detection microphones are spreading. What sets Brazil apart from many democracies is the scale of its facial-recognition push. Researchers at O Panóptico, a watchdog, count 560 active facial-recognition projects across more than 20 states. Some are police-led. Others are school attendance systems. The cameras now cover about 99 million people, more than 47% of the population.