Exporting Surveillance

Europe has some of the world's strictest rules on facial recognition. But the companies building the technology are European, and their clients are often abroad. From Brazilian classrooms to urban monitoring systems across the Global South, Investigate Europe traces how EU-made biometric tools are exported with fewer restrictions.

March 2026

Every school day in the Brazilian state of Paraná, teachers open an app, point their phone at the classroom, and let an algorithm mark who is present. Within seconds, a facial-recognition system identifies each student, matching their face against a biometric database. Up to a million children are processed this way daily. The technology that makes it possible was not built in Brazil. It was developed in Bratislava, by a Slovak company called Innovatrics.

In Europe, this kind of AI system has run into walls. Courts in France have struck down facial-recognition pilots in schools. Sweden's data protection authority fined a school board for trialling a similar system on just 22 students over three weeks. The reasoning, in each case, was the same: children cannot freely consent to biometric surveillance in settings where they have no real power to refuse.

But regulation, it turns out, is not the same as containment. The GDPR and the AI Act does not govern what European companies sell beyond the bloc's borders. And so the same technologies that face legal barriers in Stockholm or Marseille are being marketed, and deployed, in school systems, transport networks, and city-wide surveillance infrastructures from the Americas to Asia. What Europe restricts at home, its companies export abroad.

Investigate Europe has spent months tracing how European biometric technology travels. In the first instalment of this investigation, we reveal how Innovatrics' facial-recognition software came to monitor hundreds of thousands of children in Brazilian public schools, where errors in the system could put vulnerable families' access to social welfare at risk. We examine the regulatory gap that makes such exports possible, and hear from teachers, privacy advocates, and prosecutors who are pushing back.

Further reporting will follow in the coming weeks, examining other European companies whose surveillance technologies have found willing buyers overseas. You can read the investigation below and with our media partners internationally.

This investigation was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.