Reboot of Buenos Aires facial recognition plan fuels privacy fears

After a relaxing weekend away, Guillermo Ibarrola was walking out of a train station in Argentina's capital when police arrested him and accused him of a robbery committed hundreds of miles away in a place he had never visited. "It was a nightmare," Ibarrola told local media after the 2019 incident, which rights campaigners say highlights the risks of using facial recognition systems to survey populations. The system of 300 cameras linked to a national crime database -- dubbed Buenos Aires' Big Brother -- was suspended two years ago after a court found it may have been used to collect data on journalists, politicians and human rights activists, and ruled it unconstitutional.