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Facial Recognition System in Buenos Aires Triggers Police Checks Based on False Matches

1 news report Synced from source · record last edited 4 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Surveillance technology developers, Government of Argentina and 1 other and deployed by National security and intelligence stakeholders, Law enforcement and 4 others allegedly harmed Privacy, Guillermo Ibarrola and 4 others.

Risk domain
AI system safety, failures, and limitations Lack of capability or robustness
Occurred
Coverage
1 reportFeb 2024

What happened

Buenos Aires's facial recognition system mistakenly flagged innocent people as criminals, leading to wrongful stops and detentions. Judicial investigations indicate the technology may have been misused for unauthorized surveillance and data collection. Despite privacy risks, the system has been used widely without full disclosure of standards or safeguards,

Editor's notes

Reconstruction of the timeline of events: (1) 2019: Buenos Aires implements a facial recognition system aimed at enhancing public safety, capturing thousands of individuals. (2) After implementation in 2019: At least 140 individuals, including Guillermo Ibarrola, are erroneously flagged as criminals due to database errors, leading to police checks and detentions. (3) 2020: The facial recognition feature is deactivated as a precaution during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains off by judicial order. (4) December 2023: Journalists confirm that their biometric data was accessed, which in turn prompted further scrutiny by them. (5) February 5, 2024: The Pulitzer Center publishes a report on the issues surrounding Buenos Aires's facial recognition system.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under AI system safety, failures, and limitations (Lack of capability or robustness) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. How We Investigated Mass Surveillance in Argentina
    pulitzercenter.org · Karen Naundorf, Sarah Pabst

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Privacy Guillermo Ibarrola General public of Argentina General public Buenos Aires residents Biometric data subjects

AI systems implicated

Surveillance technologyFacial recognition systemsAI-enabled decision support systems

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 7.3.

  • Reliability issues

    "Relying on general-purpose AI products that fail to fulfil their intended function can lead to harm. For example, general- purpose AI systems can make up facts (‘hallucination’), generate erroneous computer code, or pro...

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Type 2: Bigger than expected

    Harm can result from AI that was not expected to have a large impact at all, such as a lab leak, a surprisingly addictive open-source product, or an unexpected repurposing of a research prototype.

    TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI (Critch2023)

  • Type 3: Worse than expected

    AI intended to have a large societal impact can turn out harmful by mistake, such as a popular product that creates problems and partially solves them only for its users.

    TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI (Critch2023)

  • Ethics and Morality Issues

    LMs need to pay more attention to universally accepted societal values at the level of ethics and morality, including the judgement of right and wrong, and its relationship with social norms and laws.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Safe learning

    "AGIs should avoid making fatal mistakes during the learning phase. Subproblems include safe exploration and distributional shift (DeepMind, OpenAI), and continual learning (Berkeley)."

    AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt2018 )

  • Malign belief distributions

    "Christiano (2016) argues that the universal distribution M (Hutter, 2005; Solomonoff, 1964a,b, 1978) is malign. The argument is somewhat intricate, and is based on the idea that a hypothesis about the world often includ...

    AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt2018 )

  • Meta-cognition

    "Agents that reason about their own computational resources and logically uncertain events can encounter strange paradoxes due to Godelian limitations (Fallenstein and Soares, 2015; Soares and Fallenstein, 2014, 2017) an...

    AGI Safety Literature Review (Everitt2018 )

  • Technical and operational risks

    "To date, technical limitations and vulnerabilities are present in most generative AI models in various contexts. Consequently, malicious users find it easier to breach an AI system’s safety and ethical guardrails to e...

    Regulating under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI (G'sell2024)

Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving National security and intelligence stakeholders

Source record: incident #829 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report