LRCO Paraná — A Cautionary Case of Facial-Recognition School Attendance Facing an LGPD Lawsuit

The Brazilian state of Paraná (population ~12 million) has used facial recognition to take school attendance since 2023. Its state technology company, Celepar, contracted the Brazilian identity firm Valid in September 2022 to build the "LRCO Paraná" app around a facial-recognition engine from the Slovak company Innovatrics. Teachers open the app, photograph the classroom, and the images are matched in the cloud against a biometric database built from students' ID photos; images are retained on government servers for one year.

By 2025 the system logs attendance for roughly 1 million of Paraná's public-school students daily across more than 1,700 schools, and the underlying approach has since spread to seven of Brazil's 27 states, with a pilot also tested in Portugal.

An independent 2025 study by researchers at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) found the system achieved only 91.1% recognition accuracy — below the 95% threshold specified in Celepar's contract with Valid — and that verification took an average of two minutes per class rather than the 30 seconds promised. A survey of the affected workforce by the APP-Sindicato teachers' union (which represents more than 65,000 educators) found that eight in ten teachers rated the facial-recognition roll call less effective than the manual method it replaced; one union leader described how, in practice, teachers often quietly stop using it once compliance pressure eases.

In April 2025, Paraná's public prosecutor's office filed a civil action against the state government, Celepar and Valid, alleging the programme violates Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD) — including an earlier enrollment form that did not let parents opt their children out of biometric capture — and sought R$15 million in collective moral damages plus a halt to data processing. A judge denied the request for an emergency suspension in May 2025, citing a lack of evidence of imminent harm; prosecutors formally appealed in September 2025, and Brazil's national data-protection authority (ANPD) and the Ministry of Education have since been summoned to comment, with a ruling expected in the first half of 2026. Because attendance records feed into eligibility checks for the Bolsa Família cash-transfer programme (which requires 75% minimum attendance for children over six), the state government says the system includes "fail-safes" against wrongful loss of benefits, though this claim has not been independently verified in the reporting reviewed.

The case has drawn attention because facial recognition in schools has been restricted or halted elsewhere on child-consent grounds — Sweden's data-protection authority fined a school board in 2019 over a small pilot, and French courts halted pilots in Nice and Marseille in 2020 — leading privacy researchers to describe the technology's export to Brazil as a form of regulatory arbitrage: vendors deploying abroad what regulators judged too invasive for children at home.

Read the full analysis: https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/facial-recognition-software-ai-europe-brazil-school-children