A Brazilian Startup Is Betting on AI to Fight Crime. Critics See a Surveillance State

Coser says whether authorities use facial recognition isn’t his call. After sharing footage, “our part is over,” he says, adding what authorities do with it is “no longer in our control.”

And by passing footage to police rather than scanning them, Gabriel positions itself to avoid responsibility for the misidentifications that follow, says Pablo Nunes, director of the Center for Studies on Public Safety and Citizenship, a non-governmental organization based in Rio de Janeiro. When he tracked Brazil’s first facial-recognition arrests in 2019, about 90% of those he identified were Black. A 2025 report led by Nunes and produced with Brazil’s federal public defender’s office found facial recognition has spread rapidly across Brazil, operating with little regulation and no public error-reporting. 

Privatizing public security has other trade-offs, Nunes says. Gabriel’s cameras are most common in richer areas. This, Nunes argues, allows a small, paying slice of the population to jump the queue for police attention. And although Gabriel has tapped into a widely shared concern among Brazilians over security, Nunes says homicide rates have dropped significantly in major Brazilian cities since 2017, with robberies following a similar downward trend. Nunes admits, despite raising concerns with neighbors, a Gabriel camera was recently installed on his building. “I lost the battle,” he says.