12 ms·

How much do I need to change my face to avoid facial recognition?

259 points by pseudolus 2y ago

mdorazio 2y ago
I wonder if adding stickers, tattoos, or makeup that look like eyes above or below your real eyes would do it.
- derefr 2y ago
  There’s even a make-up trend of “enlarging” the eyes by painting the waterline of the lower eyelid white, that could be used as a justification for walking around like this even in a totalitarian police state.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    In the current state of policing, this would just be probable cause or fits the description of type of things. Sure, you might not be identifiable by facial rec, but you'd be recognizable by every flatfoot out there, or even the see something say something crowd. Might as well just wear a face mask and sunglasses. If your FaceID can't recognize you, neither can the other systems.
    - buran77 2y ago
      > If your FaceID can't recognize you, neither can the other systems. FaceID can't recognize me if I tilt my head a bit too much to one side.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  That is, for now, 100% effective. I'm a former lead software scientist for one of the leading FR companies in the world. Pretty much all FR systems trying to operate at real time use a tiered approach to facial recognition. First detect for generic faces in an image, which collects various things that are not human faces but do collect every human face in an image. That's tier 1 image / video frame analysis, and the list of potential faces is passed on for further processing. This tier 1 analysis is the weakest part, if you can make your face fail the generic face test, it is as if you are invisible to the FR system. The easiest way to fail that generic face test is to not show your face, or to show a face that is "not human" such as has too many eyes, two noses, or a mouth above your eyes in place of any eyebrows. Sure, you'll stand out like a freak to other humans, but to the FR system you'll be invisible.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Juggalo makeup is supposedly extremely effective. Just make sure you don't how how magnets work for plausible deniability.
  - thefaux 2y ago
    I don't even have to pretend!
  - marc_abonce 2y ago
    > Juggalo makeup is supposedly extremely effective. Yeah, it's supposed to be better than black metal makeup and even better than that early-2010's anti-detection makeup: https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recognition/ https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn... https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle Although that was around 2018-2019 so, given how quickly face recognition is evolving, I wonder if juggalo makeup works anymore. Besides, as mentioned by many of the interviewees in OP's article, there's a balance between changing or hiding your facial features and looking "suspicious" or "unnatural" which is of course context dependent. Concerts are safer to "cheat" than airports.
- dathinab 2y ago
  Wrt. cameras with depth sensors like face unlock this isn't supper likely to work. Wrt. public cameras which don't have such features and are much further away and aren't supper high resolution either it maybe could even somewhat work.
iterateoften 2y ago
I had a similar thought last time I was in an airport for an international flight and instead of scanning my boarding pass and looking at my passport they just let everyone walk through and as you passed the door it would tell you your seat number. When I was in Mexico I filed a report with the airport after an employee selling timeshares was overly aggressive and grabbed my arm and try to block me from leaving. Quickly they showed me a video of my entire time with all my movements at the airport so they could pinpoint the employee. Like the article says I think it is just a matter of time until such systems are everywhere. We are already getting normalized to it at public transportation hubs with almost 0 objections. Soon most municipalities or even private businesses will implement it and no one will care because it already happens to them at the airport, so why make a fuss about it at the grocery store or on a public sidewalk.
- Zigurd 2y ago
  This reminds me of the early days of applying speech recognition. Some use cases were surprisingly good, like non-pretrained company directory name recognition. Shockingly good and it fails soft because there are a small number of possible alternative matches. Other cases, like games where the user's voice changes due to excitement/stress, were incredibly bad.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > Quickly they showed me a video of my entire time with all my movements at the airport so they could pinpoint the employee. This is just as interesting as it is creepy, but that's the world we live and this is hacker news. So, how quickly was was quickly. You made your report, they get the proper people involved, and then they show you the video. How much time passed before you were viewing the video? For someone that plays with quickly assembling an edited video from a library of video content using a database full of cuepoints, this is a very interesting problem to solve. What did the final video look like? Was it an assembled video with cuts like in a spy movie with the best angles selected in sequence? Was it each of the cameras in a multi-cam like view just starting from the time they ID'd the flight you arrived on? Did they draw the boxes around you to show the system "knew" you? I'm really curious how dystopian we actually are with the facial recognition systems like this.
Zigurd 2y ago
The article correctly points out that the amount of information available in a controlled environment. makes it not even that same problem. If I have data on your irises and blood vessels and cranium shape, good luck evading a match if I get you where I can get the same measurements. On the street there are some hacks, like measuring gait, that can compensate for less face data, but evading a useful match that's not one of a zillion false positives is much easier.
derefr 2y ago
If what you’re trying to do is to publish prepared images of yourself, that won’t be facially recognized as you, then the answer is “not very much at all actually” — see https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/ https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/. Adversarially prepared images can still look entirely like you, with all the facial-recognition-busting data being encoded at an almost-steganographic level vs our regular human perception.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  My understanding is that this (interesting) project has been abandoned, and since then, the face recognition models have been train to defend against it.
  - derefr 2y ago
    Very likely correct in the literal sense (you shouldn’t rely on the published software); but I believe the approach it uses is still relevant / generalizable. I.e. you can take whatever the current state-of-the-art facial recognition model is, and follow the steps in their paper to produce an adversarial image cloaker that will fool that model while being minimally perceptually obvious to a human. (As the models get better, the produced cloaker retains its ability to fool the model, while the “minimally perceptually obvious to a human” property is what gets sacrificed — even their 2022 version of the software started to do slightly-evident things like visibly increasing the contour of a person’s nose.)
- 1659447091 2y ago
  Do you know if this is still being worked on? The last "News" post from the link was 2022. Looks interesting.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
The thing about biometrics as discussed in more intelligent circles, is "compromised once compromised for all time". It's a public key or username not a password. Fortunately that's not true of governments. Although your government may be presently compromised it is possible, via democratic processes, to get it changed back to uncompromised. Therefore we might say, it's easier to change your government than it is to change your face. That's where you should do the work.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dathinab 2y ago
  biometrics are also way less unique then people think basically the moment you apply them to a huge population (e.g. all of US) and ignore temporal and/or local context you will find collisions especially when you consider partial samples weather that is due to errors of the sensors used or other reasons Innocent people have gone to prison because of courts ignoring reality (of biometric matches always just being a likelyhood of matching not ever a guarantee match).
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
hammock 2y ago
First order approximation is 10 years’ worth of aging, or 5 years’ worth for a child under 16. These are the timelines in which you must renew your American passport photo. Apple Face ID is always learning as well. If your brother opens your phone enough times with your passcode, it will eventually merge the two faces it recognizes
- sanj 2y ago
  citation?
  - hammock 2y ago
    First hand experience. Try it yourself?
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Google photos only has pictures of my mom from her 60s onwards, but when I put a sepia toned scan of my mom as a 9 year old, google photos asked me "is this [your mom]?"
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
satvikpendem 2y ago
Their conclusion reminds me of this lady in China, Lao Rongzhi, who was a serial killer along with her lover, Fa Ziying [0]. They both went around the country extorting and killing people, and, while Fa was arrested in 1999 via a police standoff, Lao was on the run for two decades, having had plastic surgery to change her face enough that most humans wouldn't have recognized her. But in those two decades, the state of facial recognition software had rapidly increased and she was recognized by a camera at a mall and matched to a national database of known criminals. At first police thought it were an error but after taking DNA evidence, it was confirmed to be the same person, and she was summarily executed. In this day and age, I don't think anyone can truly hide from facial recognition. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7D3mOHsVhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7D3mOHsVhg
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  Hmm, "cameras reported a 97.3% match". I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37. IE, 1 in 37 people would be tagged by the cameras. If you're talk China, that means matching millions of people in millions of malls. Possibly the actual match level was higher. But still, the way facial recognition seems to work even now is that it provides a consistent "hash value" for a face but with a limited number of digits/information (). This be useful if you know other things about the person (IE, if you know someone is a passenger on plane X, you can very likely guess which one) but still wouldn't scale unless you want a lot of false positives and are after specific people. Authorities seem to like to say DNA and facial recognition caught people since it implies an omniscience to these authorities (I note above someone throwing out the either wrong or meaningless "97.3% value). Certainly, these technologies do catch people but they still limited and expensive.
  - Epa095 2y ago
    > I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37. Why would you assume that?
  - ImprobableTruth 2y ago
    The "97.3%" match is probably just the confidence value - I don't think a frequentist interpretation makes sense for this. I'm not an expert in face recognition, but these systems are very accurate, typically like >99.5% accuracy with most of the errors coming from recall rather than precision. They're also not _that_ expensive. Real-time detection on embedded devices has been possible for around a decade and costs for high quality detection have come down a lot in recent years. Still, you're right that at those scales these systems will invariably slip once in a while and it's scary to think that this might enough to be considered a criminal, especially because people often treat these systems as infallible.
hyperific 2y ago
CV Dazzle (2010) attempted this to counter the facial recognition methods in use at that time. https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  D-ID (YC S17, [1]) promised that they would do the same. They have been quite silent on whether they ever achieved their target and nowadays they've pivoted to AI so no idea whether they ever actually succeeded. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849555
- marc_abonce 2y ago
  It looks like that makeup style might not work so well anymore, at least according to this tweet I found: https://x.com/tahkion/status/1013568373622362113 https://x.com/tahkion/status/1013568373622362113 It seems like the woman in the example is using a CV Dazzle makeup style and it doesn't fool the algorithm. Other makeup styles work better, although I think that's probably just a short term solution (tweet is from 2018) before any new trendy makeup style is added to the training dataset.
its_bbq 2y ago
Why is makeup considered cheating but surgery not?
- jquave 2y ago
  wrong app bro
- jl6 2y ago
  Maybe wearing enough makeup to hide your face would fool an algorithm, but be conspicuous enough to get you noticed anyway.
throe844i 2y ago
I welcome such tracking and surveillance. It is too easy to get accused of something. And you have no evidence to defend yourself. If you keep video recording of your surroundings forever, you now have evidence. AI will make searching such records practical. There were all sorts of safe guards to make such recordings unnecessary, such as due process. But those were practically eliminated. And people no longer have basic decency!
- dingnuts 2y ago
  who cares if you're tracked because you have nothing to hide, right? now imagine you're the wrong religion after the regime change. "I have nothing to hide" is a stupid argument that leads to concentration camps
  - simplicio 2y ago
    Seems like the Nazis managed to do the Concentration Camps thing without facial recognition software.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      But they did have tremendous data processing abilities for their time!
      - simplicio 2y ago
        I don't think keeping the data processing abilities of modern gov'ts below that of 1930's Germany is really a plausible plan for avoiding concentration camps.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Wicher 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
shae 2y ago
What about you infrared LEDs on my face?
- gehwartzen 2y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/mej7j7/glasses_that_block_faces_from_infrared_cameras/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/mej7j7...
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Oh, that guy: <https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/> (Different mechanism, similar result.)
deadbabe 2y ago
It’s trivial to also implement gait analysis to help visually identify someone if a face isn’t available. Then when you do get a glimpse of the face you can link the gait and the face identity.
SoftTalker 2y ago
I was traveling internationally earlier this year and I have grown a heavy beard since my passport photo was taken. None of the automated immigration checkpoints had any trouble identifying me.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Believe they focus on the eyes/nose shape and spacing.
  - dathinab 2y ago
    yes, they mainly focus on bone structure especially around eye nose area beards are to easy to change, and masks had been very common for some time and cover more then beards
  - throw310822 2y ago
    Which makes me wonder: what about contact lenses that can mess up with the measurement of the eyes distance, like for example having a drawing of the iris (surrounded by a portion of white sclera) that is slightly offset from the real one?
darepublic 2y ago
Need emp charges like in metal gear. A bunch of metallic confetti fills the air while you dash past the security cameras big and small
- cbanek 2y ago
  What's funny is the metallic confetti would inevitably have a serial number on it that they could trace to who bought it. Taser rounds already have this built in.
Scotrix 2y ago
“Asking our governments to create laws to protect us is much easier than…” A bit naive that, it’s too late since data is already mostly available and it just takes a different government to make this protection obsolete. That’s why we Germans/Europeans have tried to fight data collections and for protections for so long and quite hard (and probably have one of the most sophisticated policies and regulations in place) but over time it just becomes an impossibility to keep data collections as low as possible (first small exceptions for in itself very valid reasons, then more and more participants and normalization until there is no protection left…)
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  It's not too late. Maybe it is for us: but in 100 years, who will really care about a database of uncomfortably-personal details about their dead ancestors? (Sure, DNA will still be an issue, but give that 1000 years and we'll probably have a new MRCA.) If we put a stop to things now (or soon), we can nip this in the bud. It's probably not too late for us, either. Facial recognition by skull shape is still a concern, but only if the bad guys get up-to-date video of us. Otherwise, all they can do is investigate our historical activity. Other types of data have greater caveats preventing them from being useful long-term, provided we not participate in the illusion that it's "impossible to put the genie back in the bottle".
  - bigiain 2y ago
    So what you're suggesting is we do whatever we can to avoid hitting 2 degrees of universal facial recognition precision? Given that the 1.5 degree target is now inevitably impossible.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      Mass surveillance takes active maintenance, and most of its direct consequences cannot outlive the last of those subject to it. Alteration of the chemical composition of the atmosphere is expected to persist for millennia, with consequences that won't be felt for centuries. They're analogous only in that the same societal forces drive both: but trying to tackle those forces head-on is operating on such a high level of abstraction that you'd be wasting your time. Start small. Get your kid's school to take the CCTV out of the toilet rooms. There's no such problem as "facial recognition" or "mass surveillance": there are many specific instances of it. Fight those.
imron 2y ago
> If you wore sunglasses and then did something to your face (maybe wear a mask or crazy dramatic makeup) then it would be harder to detect your face, but that’s cheating on the question—that’s not changing your face, that’s just hiding it! So sunglasses and a mask then. Who cares if it’s ‘cheating’.
dathinab 2y ago
What often is fully ignored in such articles is the false positive rate. Like e.g. where I live they tested some state of the art facial recognition system on a widely used train station and applauded themself how grate it was given that the test targets where even recognized when they wore masks and capes, hats etc. But what was not told was that the false positive rate while percentage wise small (I think <1%) with the amount of expected non-match samples was still making it hardly usable. E.g. one of the train stations where I live has ~250.000 people passing through it every day, even just a false positive rate of 0.1% would be 250 wrong alarms, for one train station every single day. This is for a single train station. If you scale your search to more wider area you now have way higher numbers (and lets not just look at population size but also that many people might be falsely recognized many times during a single travel). AFIK the claimed false positive rate is often in the range of 0.01%-0.1% BUT when this system are independently tested in real world context the found false positive rate is often more like 1%-10%. So what does that mean? It means that if you have a fixed set of video to check (e.g. close to where a accident happened around +- idk. 2h of a incident) you can use such systems to pre-filter video and then post process the results over a duration of many hours. But if you try find a person in a nation of >300 Million who doesn't want to be found and missed the initial time frame where you can rely on them to be close by the a known location then you will be flooded by such a amount of false positives that it becomes practically not very useful. I mean you still can have a lucky hit.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  What does 'false positive' mean? That it thinks it is someone else, or that it thinks it is a target of an investigation?
  - TuringNYC 2y ago
    When the actual is negative but the inference is positive, rate of that. This is a very handy guide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix
    - 2y ago
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
This has been answered since the 80s. This much: https://i.imgur.com/7cuDqPI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7cuDqPI.jpg
_heimdall 2y ago
I'm of two minds when it comes to surveillance. I don't like that businesses, airports, etc do it but it is their property. I don't like that they can run video feeds through software, either in real time or after the fact, to so easily find and track my every move. But again, its their property. Where the line is always drawn for me, at a minimum, is what they do with the video and who has access to it. Video should always be deleted when it is no longer reasonably needed. That timeline would be different for airports vs convenience stores, but I'd always expect the scale of days or weeks rather than months or years (or indefinitely). Maybe more importantly, surveillance video should never be shared without a lawful warrant, including clear descriptions of the limits to what is needed and why it is requested.
- rainonmoon 2y ago
  The complicating factor is that it isn't just "their property", it's an essential destination of many people's ability to function in society, which makes them adjacent to public utilities. If the water retailer which services your home started adding substances which could be used to track and identify their customers, you'd be pretty unhappy. Private ownership doesn't absolve an entity from public accountability, especially when there is extremely little option to not engage them.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > The complicating factor is that it isn't just "their property", it's an essential destination of many people's ability to function in society That's a much bigger can of worms, one that reaches well beyond just airports. Many modern societies are extremely complex and assume individual access to a long list of resources and services. Its a pretty slippery slope though. People can absolutely choose not to fly, it isn't a basic requirement for life. The slippery slope leads to larger and larger government - as long as society continues to create implied requirements on the individual it seems reasonable to give more and more power to a central authority to ensure everyone can have that access. It sounds reasonable enough, though there isn't a good guardrail built in to avoid eventually building a totalitarian or communist state as so many things are now " basic necessities."
gehwartzen 2y ago
Kidding. (But maybe not?…) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses
costco 2y ago
The face ID feature on Bryan Johnson's phone no longer recognized him after many months of his intense health regimen: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1777789375193231778 https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1777789375193231778
- roland35 2y ago
  Looks like he hangs out with RFK on his Twitter. Boo
sandbach 2y ago
At Tianfu Airport in Chengdu, there are large screens with cameras attached that recognize your face and tell you which gate to go to. Convenient but scary, like many things in China.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
It feels increasingly like the only way to avoid such facial recognition is to suddenly grow a religious conviction that your face should not be seen by strangers
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Like a burka?
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    There are numerous religions and cultures which practice some level of covering of the face or head. Burkas are only one example. Not a great reference, but: "Religious Head Coverings: A Comprehensive Guide" <https://headcoverings-by-devorah.com/religious-head-coverings.htm https://headcoverings-by-devorah.com/religious-head-covering...> Wikipedia has a listing as a section of this article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_headgear#Religious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_headgear#Religious> (Many of these cover only the top of the head or a part of the head, e.g., yarmulke, fez, kofia. Others are more comprehensive.) The non-religious and/or cultural coverings might also be of interest.
- mmooss 2y ago
  Religious laws and convictions have been born from similar situations.
polote 2y ago
Is the tech to do facial recognition at this accuracy available to public ? Last time I checked there was deepface https://github.com/serengil/deepface/tree/master https://github.com/serengil/deepface/tree/master but it was far to work as well as that
marssaxman 2y ago
> Soon, the only real defense may be federal regulation. That doesn't sound like much of a defense!
spaceguillotine 2y ago
according to the DMV and Passport office just having bangs is enough to fool the system
marethyu 2y ago
Can wearing realistic face masks and contact lens that changes iris color possibly fool modern face recognition software?
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Maybe just wear a burka?
azalemeth 2y ago
I've often wondered what would happen if I wandered around with a bright IR led flashing on my lapel at about 30 or 60 Hz and sufficiently invisible to human eyes yet low wavelength enough to get into most CMOS chips and dazzle the camera. I think this on shopping trips routinely. I don't like being surveiled and even though I have nothing to hide (I've never shoplifted in my life!) I hate the persuasive nature of it all. I don't even mind being followed by a human that much, but I do mind algorithmic analysis that is far more effective, scary, and invasive. Sadly I think the answer to this experiment would be being asked to leave or an uncomfortable chat with a policeman. Nevertheless I silently would like someone braver than me to try it. You're allowed to wear a light on your clothes -- why not make it an IR one?
- a012 2y ago
  I guarantee that it’ll trigger an alarm to the shop security and there’ll be officer to see you immediately.
  - aetherson 2y ago
    You "guarantee" that? I think it's a possibility, but very far from universal.
    - tivert 2y ago
      Maybe not "every shop," but ones with a security guard monitoring the video who's actually doing his job, trying to "dazzle the camera" would definitely draw extra attention to you, which is probably not what you want. "Dazzle the camera" is an idea that sounds good when you fail to think about the whole system, and instead hyperfocus on one component.
      - aetherson 2y ago
        Bear in mind that lots of large, sophisticated shops have policies of not intervening when someone is blatantly shoplifting. I think you're overestimating the appetite for confrontation that many shops have. Not, again, that confrontation is impossible, just that it's not guaranteed.
jaco6 2y ago
Whether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant. Cameras and data are now so cheap that soon we will be able to track every public movement of every person in the country, making crime impossible. Once you leave your house, a street camera will see, and trace the movements of you or your car into the city and as you go about your business, with or without your face. It will follow you until you return home or check into a hotel or fall asleep in your car. Your address is public information so this isn’t a privacy violation. The current cost of storing 24 hour footage of the entire urban street area of the USA is just $100 billion annually, far less than the current total of $300 billion spent on criminal justice. This will bring an end to crime and herald a massive revival of public trust and socialization.
- nmeofthestate 2y ago
  Kudos for offering an alternative view exploring the potential upsides, but I'd take issue with "Whether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant.". Making use of all that data to fight crime would absolutely require it to be legal to capture. Edit: sorry - just realised what you mean. The footage is legal to capture and use in criminal investigations, but not using face recognition.
- dogman144 2y ago
  I get your point but the literature on this I’ve read leans towards: - ubiquitous surveillance is here (your point broadly) - the data engineering to work the data isn’t quite there, or isn’t full spectrum in the manner you argue (what prevents your theory as of now) However, what is clunky tech today can be scaled and effective tech tomorrow, so maybe your argued future is possible, if not likely. https://www.mitre[.]org/news-insights/publication/deciphering-ubiquitous-technical-surveillance https://www.mitre[.]org/news-insights/publication/decipherin...
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  I imagine somehow billionaires will be able to hide their money in stateless accounts and healthcare CEOs will still be able to murder people by the thousands and monopolistic web stores will be able to condemn their workers to death by locking them in their warehouses during tornados. Funny how that works. It will bring an end to poor people crime. Rich people crime will become uncontestable. Welcome to the new feudalism, same as the old.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Basically, the trend is you have human rights. But moving anywhere at all by any means at all is a privilege. Driving is a privilege, walking is a privilege, flying is a privilege, biking is a privilege. Of course electronic payment systems are a privilege, health care is a privilege, internet is a privilege, school is a privilege, jobs are a privilege.
stego-tech 2y ago
Not a bad piece, all told, though the general practical advice hasn't really changed in the decade-plus since I last touched the stuff: stop looking up (in general), keep as much of your face obscured as practical, try mixing up patterns to make it difficult for algorithms to match you over time, know where cameras are and how to avoid them, and if you do have to enter a known surveillance area, exit it as quickly and discreetly as possible - and adjust outfits between surveillance areas if you're particularly paranoid. That said, let me just help dash any hopes of fooling government surveillance right now. Any competent Nation State that has an axe to grind with you specifically, already has you in their dragnet. They already have enough information to match your face in grainy analog B&W surveillance footage from an ancient grocery store camera. You're not beating those short of significant cosmetic surgery or prosthetics of some sort, and even then, if they want you badly enough then they'll just pull partial prints off something you touched and validate that way. Always remember the first rule of security: if someone really wants something you have badly enough, there's nothing you can do to stop them. With that in mind, plan accordingly. It's why I don't go to protests myself, or otherwise engage with events where I know facial recognition tech is deployed: I'm in that data set, multiple times, with pristine reference materials, simply by virtue of past work (not including the updates via passport photos or Global Entry access). My safest bet is simply not to put myself in that position in the first place, and that's likely yours as well.
- idronedronedron 2y ago
  [flagged]
cbanek 2y ago
Between not wanting to be seen and sun protection, I'm tempted to go full Burka (even though I'm not religious).
cabirum 2y ago
Changing face doesn't matter. You will simply not be allowed to enter some area without a successful scan.
interludead 2y ago
I think we should push for legal frameworks that govern biometric data collection and usage
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  The people you may need to protect yourself from, might be the people writing and enforcing the laws. What you need, is a deterrent from people abusing systems.
briandear 2y ago
More so than the face, gait recognition is even more hard to fool. A person’s gait is as unique as a fingerprint.
AlfredBarnes 2y ago
I would be very surprised if every large grocery store isn't already trackin every customers movement. It would be relatively cheap to implement.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  Ready for the cocktail: >You walk in the store and are ID'd on camera >You buy everything and use your credit card, which is linked to your ID, since the checkout has a camera too. >You use your email once, or your address once, with that same credit card, all connected... now they have your email and home address. You significant other has the same address? Everything is linked. If you really want to get crazy, you can combine voting records too. Based on primary ballot numbers, you can figure out if someone voted D or R in the primary with an address. Imagine all the stuff you can get from an email address too..
exabrial 2y ago
You need to: 1. move the distance between your eyes from the center of your face a random amount 2. move both eyeballs up or down a random amount This will defeat a vast majority of simple systems. However there are far more sophisticated ones that are slower and require more resolution: 1. mess your jaw line, cheek bones, nose bones, and depth your eyes sit inside your head Finally the creme de le creme which even identical twins are as different as dogs and cats: 1. get the white of your eyes tatoo'd with new vasculature.
- tartoran 2y ago
  Shouldn't gait play a role in identifying people in addition to facial recognition? Someone was suggesting dropping a small pebble in one of the shoes (or both) to change the walk natural pattern.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    It could but I don't think it does. Has anyone built a gait recognition system? It would be tricky because it also varies simply depending on your shoes, if you're wearing a heavy backpack, if you're rolling a suitcase, etc. It's also actually really easy to change your gait if you want. Just watch someone, and then copy how they walk. Start by paying attention to whether the hold their more fixed "center" of movement in their chest, abdomen, or waist (or where in between), then match their degree of stiffness or sway, and you're most of the way there. It's a pretty common acting exercise.
    - ItDoBeWimdyTho 2y ago
      I searched google scholar for "gait surveillance" articles since 2023 and got 12,000 results. I'd be willing to bet some of them are in operation at this point.
    - debugnik 2y ago
      > Has anyone built a gait recognition system? Years ago it was announced that some Chinese cities would use gait recognition for surveillance, but I don't know if the deployment stuck. I remember a video showing off the tech, although I can't look for it right now.
Clubber 2y ago
To circumvent facial recognition, wear a mask. Nearly all of the BLM rioters wore masks and very few (if any) were caught. Most of the J6 people didn't wear a mask and almost all of them were caught. Wear a simple surgical mask like was common during covid.
brodouevencode 2y ago
The timing of this with respect to AI/FR being a hotly reported technology used in the search of the UnitedHealthcare Insurance CEO is kinda gross. But such are the times.
- araes 2y ago
  Don't know about the gross part (seems relevant, exactly how they pursued the suspect). However, kind of amazed you're the only reference on here. The part of the UnitedHealthCare situation that seemed kind of amazing from a personal perspective was how little the suspect actually seemed to look like the public photos released. If I were calculating "confidence", that would have been relatively far down in the percentages. Vaguely similar to a lot of euro-background ethnicity faces. Maybe there were other photos the police had and didn't release. However, from what was available, with two photos showing the mask removed and one with somebody smiling, not a great match. Tried four reverse images searches online. Started with 1920x1280 release (blurry), and got down to two (2) ~550x550 images of the cropped face. Results from four attempts were: 1) Complained about quality, gave back electro-music looking guy in rainjacket 2) Not a valid face on both photos 3) Gave back police publicity photos as only results 4) Not a valid face on both photos Not a great sensation of positive confidence percentage on the actual match. Figure the police likely would have attempted to release a relatively high quality still image to help crime solvers.
tivert 2y ago
Remember when technology was going to liberate the common man? It turns out the tyrants are almost always in a better position to use it for tyranny.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  Eh, they cant control messages as well. Communication worldwide is easier than ever. But yes, weapons are stronger too. Things aren't black and white.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Eh, they cant control messages as well. Communication worldwide is easier than ever. They totally can (see China, People's Republic Of), it's just in many places the authorities have not yet chosen to. It's pure fantasy to think you'll be able to run around an resist (or even just ignore) Big Brother with a cell phone running Signal. Computer technology has an asymmetry that, despite 90s-era propaganda, actually favors the tyrants. It's time we acknowledge that. > But yes, weapons are stronger too. Not in any way that's meaningful when discussing tyranny.
bookofjoe 2y ago
"Hum," a new novel by Helen Phillips, addresses this question precisely. The premise: A woman who's not well off financially after losing her job signs up for a study in which an advanced robot surgically alters her face ever so minimally so as to use her as a test case for the company's state-of-the-art/bleeding edge (sorry) facial recognition software. She signed up because having become unemployed with no prospect of future employment, her husband's job as a gig-handyman which is mostly pest control and pays terribly, and two young children, she fears being evicted from their apartment. The study offers a huge payment in advance, enough for their family to live in comfort for 10 months without any other income source. One problem soon becomes apparent: in altering her appearance ever so slightly, her family and everyone she knows are taken aback: she look just like she used to, but somehow not quite: the study is intended to see how surveillance video handles faces in the uncanny valley — by creating them. NO — I have not ruined the book if you're thinking about reading it: my introduction above happens early on, following which the story explodes in unexpected, compelling directions. This book is beautifully written: it's sci-fi, the sixth book by a highly regarded and awarded novelist. Read the first 19 pages (of 244) here: https://www.amazon.com/Hum-Novel-Helen-Phillips/dp/1668008831/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rzmz7-qhx4R52Xvx9fABFg.MGra7GJHoUQlOjEOHpxun_-8lQVutXAg7UbFoIgEj6Q&dib_tag=se&hvadid=700283318859&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1027070&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=16756753293554326182&hvtargid=kwd-2500733804592&hydadcr=22561_13531225&keywords=hum+by+helen+phillips&qid=1733762135&sr=8-1&asin=1668008831&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1 https://www.amazon.com/Hum-Novel-Helen-Phillips/dp/166800883...
- hcaz 2y ago
  Added to my read-list
  - beretguy 2y ago
    Added to my weekend project to implement list.
- pempem 2y ago
  Immediate add! This is so interesting Hopefully folks understand that this is dystopian rather than a roadmap to their next product proposal
nonameiguess 2y ago
I don't suppose anyone here knows the answer, but claims of matching accuracy like this make me wonder why basic touch ID so often fails and I need to delete my fingerprints and re-enroll. I always figured it was because of rock climbing tearing up my fingers and making the prints gradually different enough that they no longer match. Is it really easier to fool a fingerprint match than a face match? Or was I just wrong all along and the sensors suck? But if the sensors suck, why does deleting and re-enrolling work?
JimmyWilliams1 2y ago
[dead]
LinuxBender 2y ago
How much do I need to change my face to avoid facial recognition? Taboo opinions inspired by W.O.P.R. Avoid playing the game: - Stay clear of areas with cameras when possible. Revenue impacting. - Do Zoom or Jitsi calls with businesses and associates when you can. - Become self sufficient. Stop spending money when it is not required and have healthy groceries delivered to you. Reduce tax revenue. - Work from home if your company permits it. Go mostly off grid. - Hire someone to run errands for you when they can not be avoided. Pay cash to a neighbors kid to run into town. I know none of this will be popular with anyone but I am that guy.
wkat4242 2y ago
> I think during the pandemic they changed the systems to rely heavily on the shape of people’s eyes, because so many people were wearing masks over their noses and mouths. I don’t honestly know how people could realistically change the shape of their eyes to fool these systems. Eh party contacts maybe? I use those a lot.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nitwit005 2y ago
> I think you could not realistically change your face to fool state-of-the-art facial recognition. I think during the pandemic they changed the systems to rely heavily on the shape of people’s eyes, because so many people were wearing masks over their noses and mouths. I don’t honestly know how people could realistically change the shape of their eyes to fool these systems. There are multiple common cosmetic surgeries that involve eye shape. > And now your face won’t match your driver’s license or passport, so traveling will be really difficult for you. So, honestly, why bother? My drivers license photo went un-updated for over a decade. I didn't look remotely similar to my teenage self, and not a single person cared. Excepting one airport security person who commented on how old the photo was.

259 points by pseudolus 2y ago

mdorazio 2y ago

I wonder if adding stickers, tattoos, or makeup that look like eyes above or below your real eyes would do it.

derefr 2y ago
There’s even a make-up trend of “enlarging” the eyes by painting the waterline of the lower eyelid white, that could be used as a justification for walking around like this even in a totalitarian police state.
- dylan604 2y ago
  In the current state of policing, this would just be probable cause or fits the description of type of things. Sure, you might not be identifiable by facial rec, but you'd be recognizable by every flatfoot out there, or even the see something say something crowd. Might as well just wear a face mask and sunglasses. If your FaceID can't recognize you, neither can the other systems.
  - buran77 2y ago
    > If your FaceID can't recognize you, neither can the other systems. FaceID can't recognize me if I tilt my head a bit too much to one side.
bsenftner 2y ago
That is, for now, 100% effective. I'm a former lead software scientist for one of the leading FR companies in the world. Pretty much all FR systems trying to operate at real time use a tiered approach to facial recognition. First detect for generic faces in an image, which collects various things that are not human faces but do collect every human face in an image. That's tier 1 image / video frame analysis, and the list of potential faces is passed on for further processing. This tier 1 analysis is the weakest part, if you can make your face fail the generic face test, it is as if you are invisible to the FR system. The easiest way to fail that generic face test is to not show your face, or to show a face that is "not human" such as has too many eyes, two noses, or a mouth above your eyes in place of any eyebrows. Sure, you'll stand out like a freak to other humans, but to the FR system you'll be invisible.
moffkalast 2y ago
Juggalo makeup is supposedly extremely effective. Just make sure you don't how how magnets work for plausible deniability.
- thefaux 2y ago
  I don't even have to pretend!
- marc_abonce 2y ago
  > Juggalo makeup is supposedly extremely effective. Yeah, it's supposed to be better than black metal makeup and even better than that early-2010's anti-detection makeup: https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recognition/ https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn... https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle Although that was around 2018-2019 so, given how quickly face recognition is evolving, I wonder if juggalo makeup works anymore. Besides, as mentioned by many of the interviewees in OP's article, there's a balance between changing or hiding your facial features and looking "suspicious" or "unnatural" which is of course context dependent. Concerts are safer to "cheat" than airports.
dathinab 2y ago
Wrt. cameras with depth sensors like face unlock this isn't supper likely to work. Wrt. public cameras which don't have such features and are much further away and aren't supper high resolution either it maybe could even somewhat work.

iterateoften 2y ago

I had a similar thought last time I was in an airport for an international flight and instead of scanning my boarding pass and looking at my passport they just let everyone walk through and as you passed the door it would tell you your seat number. When I was in Mexico I filed a report with the airport after an employee selling timeshares was overly aggressive and grabbed my arm and try to block me from leaving. Quickly they showed me a video of my entire time with all my movements at the airport so they could pinpoint the employee. Like the article says I think it is just a matter of time until such systems are everywhere. We are already getting normalized to it at public transportation hubs with almost 0 objections. Soon most municipalities or even private businesses will implement it and no one will care because it already happens to them at the airport, so why make a fuss about it at the grocery store or on a public sidewalk.

Zigurd 2y ago
This reminds me of the early days of applying speech recognition. Some use cases were surprisingly good, like non-pretrained company directory name recognition. Shockingly good and it fails soft because there are a small number of possible alternative matches. Other cases, like games where the user's voice changes due to excitement/stress, were incredibly bad.
dylan604 2y ago
> Quickly they showed me a video of my entire time with all my movements at the airport so they could pinpoint the employee. This is just as interesting as it is creepy, but that's the world we live and this is hacker news. So, how quickly was was quickly. You made your report, they get the proper people involved, and then they show you the video. How much time passed before you were viewing the video? For someone that plays with quickly assembling an edited video from a library of video content using a database full of cuepoints, this is a very interesting problem to solve. What did the final video look like? Was it an assembled video with cuts like in a spy movie with the best angles selected in sequence? Was it each of the cameras in a multi-cam like view just starting from the time they ID'd the flight you arrived on? Did they draw the boxes around you to show the system "knew" you? I'm really curious how dystopian we actually are with the facial recognition systems like this.

Zigurd 2y ago

The article correctly points out that the amount of information available in a controlled environment. makes it not even that same problem. If I have data on your irises and blood vessels and cranium shape, good luck evading a match if I get you where I can get the same measurements. On the street there are some hacks, like measuring gait, that can compensate for less face data, but evading a useful match that's not one of a zillion false positives is much easier.

derefr 2y ago

If what you’re trying to do is to publish prepared images of yourself, that won’t be facially recognized as you, then the answer is “not very much at all actually” — see https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/ https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/. Adversarially prepared images can still look entirely like you, with all the facial-recognition-busting data being encoded at an almost-steganographic level vs our regular human perception.

sebastiennight 2y ago
My understanding is that this (interesting) project has been abandoned, and since then, the face recognition models have been train to defend against it.
- derefr 2y ago
  Very likely correct in the literal sense (you shouldn’t rely on the published software); but I believe the approach it uses is still relevant / generalizable. I.e. you can take whatever the current state-of-the-art facial recognition model is, and follow the steps in their paper to produce an adversarial image cloaker that will fool that model while being minimally perceptually obvious to a human. (As the models get better, the produced cloaker retains its ability to fool the model, while the “minimally perceptually obvious to a human” property is what gets sacrificed — even their 2022 version of the software started to do slightly-evident things like visibly increasing the contour of a person’s nose.)
1659447091 2y ago
Do you know if this is still being worked on? The last "News" post from the link was 2022. Looks interesting.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

The thing about biometrics as discussed in more intelligent circles, is "compromised once compromised for all time". It's a public key or username not a password. Fortunately that's not true of governments. Although your government may be presently compromised it is possible, via democratic processes, to get it changed back to uncompromised. Therefore we might say, it's easier to change your government than it is to change your face. That's where you should do the work.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dathinab 2y ago
biometrics are also way less unique then people think basically the moment you apply them to a huge population (e.g. all of US) and ignore temporal and/or local context you will find collisions especially when you consider partial samples weather that is due to errors of the sensors used or other reasons Innocent people have gone to prison because of courts ignoring reality (of biometric matches always just being a likelyhood of matching not ever a guarantee match).

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

hammock 2y ago

First order approximation is 10 years’ worth of aging, or 5 years’ worth for a child under 16. These are the timelines in which you must renew your American passport photo. Apple Face ID is always learning as well. If your brother opens your phone enough times with your passcode, it will eventually merge the two faces it recognizes

sanj 2y ago
citation?
- hammock 2y ago
  First hand experience. Try it yourself?
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Google photos only has pictures of my mom from her 60s onwards, but when I put a sepia toned scan of my mom as a 9 year old, google photos asked me "is this [your mom]?"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

satvikpendem 2y ago

Their conclusion reminds me of this lady in China, Lao Rongzhi, who was a serial killer along with her lover, Fa Ziying [0]. They both went around the country extorting and killing people, and, while Fa was arrested in 1999 via a police standoff, Lao was on the run for two decades, having had plastic surgery to change her face enough that most humans wouldn't have recognized her. But in those two decades, the state of facial recognition software had rapidly increased and she was recognized by a camera at a mall and matched to a national database of known criminals. At first police thought it were an error but after taking DNA evidence, it was confirmed to be the same person, and she was summarily executed. In this day and age, I don't think anyone can truly hide from facial recognition. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7D3mOHsVhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7D3mOHsVhg

joe_the_user 2y ago
Hmm, "cameras reported a 97.3% match". I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37. IE, 1 in 37 people would be tagged by the cameras. If you're talk China, that means matching millions of people in millions of malls. Possibly the actual match level was higher. But still, the way facial recognition seems to work even now is that it provides a consistent "hash value" for a face but with a limited number of digits/information (). This be useful if you know other things about the person (IE, if you know someone is a passenger on plane X, you can very likely guess which one) but still wouldn't scale unless you want a lot of false positives and are after specific people. Authorities seem to like to say DNA and facial recognition caught people since it implies an omniscience to these authorities (I note above someone throwing out the either wrong or meaningless "97.3% value). Certainly, these technologies do catch people but they still limited and expensive.
- Epa095 2y ago
  > I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37. Why would you assume that?
- ImprobableTruth 2y ago
  The "97.3%" match is probably just the confidence value - I don't think a frequentist interpretation makes sense for this. I'm not an expert in face recognition, but these systems are very accurate, typically like >99.5% accuracy with most of the errors coming from recall rather than precision. They're also not _that_ expensive. Real-time detection on embedded devices has been possible for around a decade and costs for high quality detection have come down a lot in recent years. Still, you're right that at those scales these systems will invariably slip once in a while and it's scary to think that this might enough to be considered a criminal, especially because people often treat these systems as infallible.

hyperific 2y ago

CV Dazzle (2010) attempted this to counter the facial recognition methods in use at that time. https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
probably_wrong 2y ago
D-ID (YC S17, [1]) promised that they would do the same. They have been quite silent on whether they ever achieved their target and nowadays they've pivoted to AI so no idea whether they ever actually succeeded. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849555
marc_abonce 2y ago
It looks like that makeup style might not work so well anymore, at least according to this tweet I found: https://x.com/tahkion/status/1013568373622362113 https://x.com/tahkion/status/1013568373622362113 It seems like the woman in the example is using a CV Dazzle makeup style and it doesn't fool the algorithm. Other makeup styles work better, although I think that's probably just a short term solution (tweet is from 2018) before any new trendy makeup style is added to the training dataset.

its_bbq 2y ago

Why is makeup considered cheating but surgery not?

jquave 2y ago
wrong app bro
jl6 2y ago
Maybe wearing enough makeup to hide your face would fool an algorithm, but be conspicuous enough to get you noticed anyway.

throe844i 2y ago

I welcome such tracking and surveillance. It is too easy to get accused of something. And you have no evidence to defend yourself. If you keep video recording of your surroundings forever, you now have evidence. AI will make searching such records practical. There were all sorts of safe guards to make such recordings unnecessary, such as due process. But those were practically eliminated. And people no longer have basic decency!

dingnuts 2y ago
who cares if you're tracked because you have nothing to hide, right? now imagine you're the wrong religion after the regime change. "I have nothing to hide" is a stupid argument that leads to concentration camps
- simplicio 2y ago
  Seems like the Nazis managed to do the Concentration Camps thing without facial recognition software.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    But they did have tremendous data processing abilities for their time!
    - simplicio 2y ago
      I don't think keeping the data processing abilities of modern gov'ts below that of 1930's Germany is really a plausible plan for avoiding concentration camps.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - Wicher 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

shae 2y ago

What about you infrared LEDs on my face?

gehwartzen 2y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/mej7j7/glasses_that_block_faces_from_infrared_cameras/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/mej7j7...
dredmorbius 2y ago
Oh, that guy: <https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/> (Different mechanism, similar result.)

deadbabe 2y ago

It’s trivial to also implement gait analysis to help visually identify someone if a face isn’t available. Then when you do get a glimpse of the face you can link the gait and the face identity.

SoftTalker 2y ago

I was traveling internationally earlier this year and I have grown a heavy beard since my passport photo was taken. None of the automated immigration checkpoints had any trouble identifying me.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Believe they focus on the eyes/nose shape and spacing.
- dathinab 2y ago
  yes, they mainly focus on bone structure especially around eye nose area beards are to easy to change, and masks had been very common for some time and cover more then beards
- throw310822 2y ago
  Which makes me wonder: what about contact lenses that can mess up with the measurement of the eyes distance, like for example having a drawing of the iris (surrounded by a portion of white sclera) that is slightly offset from the real one?

darepublic 2y ago

Need emp charges like in metal gear. A bunch of metallic confetti fills the air while you dash past the security cameras big and small

cbanek 2y ago
What's funny is the metallic confetti would inevitably have a serial number on it that they could trace to who bought it. Taser rounds already have this built in.

Scotrix 2y ago

“Asking our governments to create laws to protect us is much easier than…” A bit naive that, it’s too late since data is already mostly available and it just takes a different government to make this protection obsolete. That’s why we Germans/Europeans have tried to fight data collections and for protections for so long and quite hard (and probably have one of the most sophisticated policies and regulations in place) but over time it just becomes an impossibility to keep data collections as low as possible (first small exceptions for in itself very valid reasons, then more and more participants and normalization until there is no protection left…)

wizzwizz4 2y ago
It's not too late. Maybe it is for us: but in 100 years, who will really care about a database of uncomfortably-personal details about their dead ancestors? (Sure, DNA will still be an issue, but give that 1000 years and we'll probably have a new MRCA.) If we put a stop to things now (or soon), we can nip this in the bud. It's probably not too late for us, either. Facial recognition by skull shape is still a concern, but only if the bad guys get up-to-date video of us. Otherwise, all they can do is investigate our historical activity. Other types of data have greater caveats preventing them from being useful long-term, provided we not participate in the illusion that it's "impossible to put the genie back in the bottle".
- bigiain 2y ago
  So what you're suggesting is we do whatever we can to avoid hitting 2 degrees of universal facial recognition precision? Given that the 1.5 degree target is now inevitably impossible.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Mass surveillance takes active maintenance, and most of its direct consequences cannot outlive the last of those subject to it. Alteration of the chemical composition of the atmosphere is expected to persist for millennia, with consequences that won't be felt for centuries. They're analogous only in that the same societal forces drive both: but trying to tackle those forces head-on is operating on such a high level of abstraction that you'd be wasting your time. Start small. Get your kid's school to take the CCTV out of the toilet rooms. There's no such problem as "facial recognition" or "mass surveillance": there are many specific instances of it. Fight those.

imron 2y ago

> If you wore sunglasses and then did something to your face (maybe wear a mask or crazy dramatic makeup) then it would be harder to detect your face, but that’s cheating on the question—that’s not changing your face, that’s just hiding it! So sunglasses and a mask then. Who cares if it’s ‘cheating’.

dathinab 2y ago

What often is fully ignored in such articles is the false positive rate. Like e.g. where I live they tested some state of the art facial recognition system on a widely used train station and applauded themself how grate it was given that the test targets where even recognized when they wore masks and capes, hats etc. But what was not told was that the false positive rate while percentage wise small (I think <1%) with the amount of expected non-match samples was still making it hardly usable. E.g. one of the train stations where I live has ~250.000 people passing through it every day, even just a false positive rate of 0.1% would be 250 wrong alarms, for one train station every single day. This is for a single train station. If you scale your search to more wider area you now have way higher numbers (and lets not just look at population size but also that many people might be falsely recognized many times during a single travel). AFIK the claimed false positive rate is often in the range of 0.01%-0.1% BUT when this system are independently tested in real world context the found false positive rate is often more like 1%-10%. So what does that mean? It means that if you have a fixed set of video to check (e.g. close to where a accident happened around +- idk. 2h of a incident) you can use such systems to pre-filter video and then post process the results over a duration of many hours. But if you try find a person in a nation of >300 Million who doesn't want to be found and missed the initial time frame where you can rely on them to be close by the a known location then you will be flooded by such a amount of false positives that it becomes practically not very useful. I mean you still can have a lucky hit.

Eisenstein 2y ago
What does 'false positive' mean? That it thinks it is someone else, or that it thinks it is a target of an investigation?
- TuringNYC 2y ago
  When the actual is negative but the inference is positive, rate of that. This is a very handy guide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix
  - 2y ago

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

This has been answered since the 80s. This much: https://i.imgur.com/7cuDqPI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7cuDqPI.jpg

_heimdall 2y ago

I'm of two minds when it comes to surveillance. I don't like that businesses, airports, etc do it but it is their property. I don't like that they can run video feeds through software, either in real time or after the fact, to so easily find and track my every move. But again, its their property. Where the line is always drawn for me, at a minimum, is what they do with the video and who has access to it. Video should always be deleted when it is no longer reasonably needed. That timeline would be different for airports vs convenience stores, but I'd always expect the scale of days or weeks rather than months or years (or indefinitely). Maybe more importantly, surveillance video should never be shared without a lawful warrant, including clear descriptions of the limits to what is needed and why it is requested.

rainonmoon 2y ago
The complicating factor is that it isn't just "their property", it's an essential destination of many people's ability to function in society, which makes them adjacent to public utilities. If the water retailer which services your home started adding substances which could be used to track and identify their customers, you'd be pretty unhappy. Private ownership doesn't absolve an entity from public accountability, especially when there is extremely little option to not engage them.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > The complicating factor is that it isn't just "their property", it's an essential destination of many people's ability to function in society That's a much bigger can of worms, one that reaches well beyond just airports. Many modern societies are extremely complex and assume individual access to a long list of resources and services. Its a pretty slippery slope though. People can absolutely choose not to fly, it isn't a basic requirement for life. The slippery slope leads to larger and larger government - as long as society continues to create implied requirements on the individual it seems reasonable to give more and more power to a central authority to ensure everyone can have that access. It sounds reasonable enough, though there isn't a good guardrail built in to avoid eventually building a totalitarian or communist state as so many things are now " basic necessities."

gehwartzen 2y ago

Kidding. (But maybe not?…) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses

costco 2y ago

The face ID feature on Bryan Johnson's phone no longer recognized him after many months of his intense health regimen: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1777789375193231778 https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1777789375193231778

roland35 2y ago
Looks like he hangs out with RFK on his Twitter. Boo

sandbach 2y ago

At Tianfu Airport in Chengdu, there are large screens with cameras attached that recognize your face and tell you which gate to go to. Convenient but scary, like many things in China.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

It feels increasingly like the only way to avoid such facial recognition is to suddenly grow a religious conviction that your face should not be seen by strangers

dotancohen 2y ago
Like a burka?
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  There are numerous religions and cultures which practice some level of covering of the face or head. Burkas are only one example. Not a great reference, but: "Religious Head Coverings: A Comprehensive Guide" <https://headcoverings-by-devorah.com/religious-head-coverings.htm https://headcoverings-by-devorah.com/religious-head-covering...> Wikipedia has a listing as a section of this article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_headgear#Religious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_headgear#Religious> (Many of these cover only the top of the head or a part of the head, e.g., yarmulke, fez, kofia. Others are more comprehensive.) The non-religious and/or cultural coverings might also be of interest.
mmooss 2y ago
Religious laws and convictions have been born from similar situations.

polote 2y ago

Is the tech to do facial recognition at this accuracy available to public ? Last time I checked there was deepface https://github.com/serengil/deepface/tree/master https://github.com/serengil/deepface/tree/master but it was far to work as well as that

marssaxman 2y ago

> Soon, the only real defense may be federal regulation. That doesn't sound like much of a defense!

spaceguillotine 2y ago

according to the DMV and Passport office just having bangs is enough to fool the system

marethyu 2y ago

Can wearing realistic face masks and contact lens that changes iris color possibly fool modern face recognition software?

dotancohen 2y ago
Maybe just wear a burka?

azalemeth 2y ago

I've often wondered what would happen if I wandered around with a bright IR led flashing on my lapel at about 30 or 60 Hz and sufficiently invisible to human eyes yet low wavelength enough to get into most CMOS chips and dazzle the camera. I think this on shopping trips routinely. I don't like being surveiled and even though I have nothing to hide (I've never shoplifted in my life!) I hate the persuasive nature of it all. I don't even mind being followed by a human that much, but I do mind algorithmic analysis that is far more effective, scary, and invasive. Sadly I think the answer to this experiment would be being asked to leave or an uncomfortable chat with a policeman. Nevertheless I silently would like someone braver than me to try it. You're allowed to wear a light on your clothes -- why not make it an IR one?

a012 2y ago
I guarantee that it’ll trigger an alarm to the shop security and there’ll be officer to see you immediately.
- aetherson 2y ago
  You "guarantee" that? I think it's a possibility, but very far from universal.
  - tivert 2y ago
    Maybe not "every shop," but ones with a security guard monitoring the video who's actually doing his job, trying to "dazzle the camera" would definitely draw extra attention to you, which is probably not what you want. "Dazzle the camera" is an idea that sounds good when you fail to think about the whole system, and instead hyperfocus on one component.
    - aetherson 2y ago
      Bear in mind that lots of large, sophisticated shops have policies of not intervening when someone is blatantly shoplifting. I think you're overestimating the appetite for confrontation that many shops have. Not, again, that confrontation is impossible, just that it's not guaranteed.

jaco6 2y ago

Whether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant. Cameras and data are now so cheap that soon we will be able to track every public movement of every person in the country, making crime impossible. Once you leave your house, a street camera will see, and trace the movements of you or your car into the city and as you go about your business, with or without your face. It will follow you until you return home or check into a hotel or fall asleep in your car. Your address is public information so this isn’t a privacy violation. The current cost of storing 24 hour footage of the entire urban street area of the USA is just $100 billion annually, far less than the current total of $300 billion spent on criminal justice. This will bring an end to crime and herald a massive revival of public trust and socialization.

nmeofthestate 2y ago
Kudos for offering an alternative view exploring the potential upsides, but I'd take issue with "Whether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant.". Making use of all that data to fight crime would absolutely require it to be legal to capture. Edit: sorry - just realised what you mean. The footage is legal to capture and use in criminal investigations, but not using face recognition.
dogman144 2y ago
I get your point but the literature on this I’ve read leans towards: - ubiquitous surveillance is here (your point broadly) - the data engineering to work the data isn’t quite there, or isn’t full spectrum in the manner you argue (what prevents your theory as of now) However, what is clunky tech today can be scaled and effective tech tomorrow, so maybe your argued future is possible, if not likely. https://www.mitre[.]org/news-insights/publication/deciphering-ubiquitous-technical-surveillance https://www.mitre[.]org/news-insights/publication/decipherin...
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
I imagine somehow billionaires will be able to hide their money in stateless accounts and healthcare CEOs will still be able to murder people by the thousands and monopolistic web stores will be able to condemn their workers to death by locking them in their warehouses during tornados. Funny how that works. It will bring an end to poor people crime. Rich people crime will become uncontestable. Welcome to the new feudalism, same as the old.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Basically, the trend is you have human rights. But moving anywhere at all by any means at all is a privilege. Driving is a privilege, walking is a privilege, flying is a privilege, biking is a privilege. Of course electronic payment systems are a privilege, health care is a privilege, internet is a privilege, school is a privilege, jobs are a privilege.

stego-tech 2y ago

Not a bad piece, all told, though the general practical advice hasn't really changed in the decade-plus since I last touched the stuff: stop looking up (in general), keep as much of your face obscured as practical, try mixing up patterns to make it difficult for algorithms to match you over time, know where cameras are and how to avoid them, and if you do have to enter a known surveillance area, exit it as quickly and discreetly as possible - and adjust outfits between surveillance areas if you're particularly paranoid. That said, let me just help dash any hopes of fooling government surveillance right now. Any competent Nation State that has an axe to grind with you specifically, already has you in their dragnet. They already have enough information to match your face in grainy analog B&W surveillance footage from an ancient grocery store camera. You're not beating those short of significant cosmetic surgery or prosthetics of some sort, and even then, if they want you badly enough then they'll just pull partial prints off something you touched and validate that way. Always remember the first rule of security: if someone really wants something you have badly enough, there's nothing you can do to stop them. With that in mind, plan accordingly. It's why I don't go to protests myself, or otherwise engage with events where I know facial recognition tech is deployed: I'm in that data set, multiple times, with pristine reference materials, simply by virtue of past work (not including the updates via passport photos or Global Entry access). My safest bet is simply not to put myself in that position in the first place, and that's likely yours as well.

idronedronedron 2y ago
[flagged]

cbanek 2y ago

Between not wanting to be seen and sun protection, I'm tempted to go full Burka (even though I'm not religious).

cabirum 2y ago

Changing face doesn't matter. You will simply not be allowed to enter some area without a successful scan.

interludead 2y ago

I think we should push for legal frameworks that govern biometric data collection and usage

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
The people you may need to protect yourself from, might be the people writing and enforcing the laws. What you need, is a deterrent from people abusing systems.

briandear 2y ago

More so than the face, gait recognition is even more hard to fool. A person’s gait is as unique as a fingerprint.

AlfredBarnes 2y ago

I would be very surprised if every large grocery store isn't already trackin every customers movement. It would be relatively cheap to implement.

resource_waste 2y ago
Ready for the cocktail: >You walk in the store and are ID'd on camera >You buy everything and use your credit card, which is linked to your ID, since the checkout has a camera too. >You use your email once, or your address once, with that same credit card, all connected... now they have your email and home address. You significant other has the same address? Everything is linked. If you really want to get crazy, you can combine voting records too. Based on primary ballot numbers, you can figure out if someone voted D or R in the primary with an address. Imagine all the stuff you can get from an email address too..

exabrial 2y ago

You need to: 1. move the distance between your eyes from the center of your face a random amount 2. move both eyeballs up or down a random amount This will defeat a vast majority of simple systems. However there are far more sophisticated ones that are slower and require more resolution: 1. mess your jaw line, cheek bones, nose bones, and depth your eyes sit inside your head Finally the creme de le creme which even identical twins are as different as dogs and cats: 1. get the white of your eyes tatoo'd with new vasculature.

tartoran 2y ago
Shouldn't gait play a role in identifying people in addition to facial recognition? Someone was suggesting dropping a small pebble in one of the shoes (or both) to change the walk natural pattern.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  It could but I don't think it does. Has anyone built a gait recognition system? It would be tricky because it also varies simply depending on your shoes, if you're wearing a heavy backpack, if you're rolling a suitcase, etc. It's also actually really easy to change your gait if you want. Just watch someone, and then copy how they walk. Start by paying attention to whether the hold their more fixed "center" of movement in their chest, abdomen, or waist (or where in between), then match their degree of stiffness or sway, and you're most of the way there. It's a pretty common acting exercise.
  - ItDoBeWimdyTho 2y ago
    I searched google scholar for "gait surveillance" articles since 2023 and got 12,000 results. I'd be willing to bet some of them are in operation at this point.
  - debugnik 2y ago
    > Has anyone built a gait recognition system? Years ago it was announced that some Chinese cities would use gait recognition for surveillance, but I don't know if the deployment stuck. I remember a video showing off the tech, although I can't look for it right now.

Clubber 2y ago

To circumvent facial recognition, wear a mask. Nearly all of the BLM rioters wore masks and very few (if any) were caught. Most of the J6 people didn't wear a mask and almost all of them were caught. Wear a simple surgical mask like was common during covid.

brodouevencode 2y ago

The timing of this with respect to AI/FR being a hotly reported technology used in the search of the UnitedHealthcare Insurance CEO is kinda gross. But such are the times.

araes 2y ago
Don't know about the gross part (seems relevant, exactly how they pursued the suspect). However, kind of amazed you're the only reference on here. The part of the UnitedHealthCare situation that seemed kind of amazing from a personal perspective was how little the suspect actually seemed to look like the public photos released. If I were calculating "confidence", that would have been relatively far down in the percentages. Vaguely similar to a lot of euro-background ethnicity faces. Maybe there were other photos the police had and didn't release. However, from what was available, with two photos showing the mask removed and one with somebody smiling, not a great match. Tried four reverse images searches online. Started with 1920x1280 release (blurry), and got down to two (2) ~550x550 images of the cropped face. Results from four attempts were: 1) Complained about quality, gave back electro-music looking guy in rainjacket 2) Not a valid face on both photos 3) Gave back police publicity photos as only results 4) Not a valid face on both photos Not a great sensation of positive confidence percentage on the actual match. Figure the police likely would have attempted to release a relatively high quality still image to help crime solvers.

tivert 2y ago

Remember when technology was going to liberate the common man? It turns out the tyrants are almost always in a better position to use it for tyranny.

resource_waste 2y ago
Eh, they cant control messages as well. Communication worldwide is easier than ever. But yes, weapons are stronger too. Things aren't black and white.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Eh, they cant control messages as well. Communication worldwide is easier than ever. They totally can (see China, People's Republic Of), it's just in many places the authorities have not yet chosen to. It's pure fantasy to think you'll be able to run around an resist (or even just ignore) Big Brother with a cell phone running Signal. Computer technology has an asymmetry that, despite 90s-era propaganda, actually favors the tyrants. It's time we acknowledge that. > But yes, weapons are stronger too. Not in any way that's meaningful when discussing tyranny.

bookofjoe 2y ago

"Hum," a new novel by Helen Phillips, addresses this question precisely. The premise: A woman who's not well off financially after losing her job signs up for a study in which an advanced robot surgically alters her face ever so minimally so as to use her as a test case for the company's state-of-the-art/bleeding edge (sorry) facial recognition software. She signed up because having become unemployed with no prospect of future employment, her husband's job as a gig-handyman which is mostly pest control and pays terribly, and two young children, she fears being evicted from their apartment. The study offers a huge payment in advance, enough for their family to live in comfort for 10 months without any other income source. One problem soon becomes apparent: in altering her appearance ever so slightly, her family and everyone she knows are taken aback: she look just like she used to, but somehow not quite: the study is intended to see how surveillance video handles faces in the uncanny valley — by creating them. NO — I have not ruined the book if you're thinking about reading it: my introduction above happens early on, following which the story explodes in unexpected, compelling directions. This book is beautifully written: it's sci-fi, the sixth book by a highly regarded and awarded novelist. Read the first 19 pages (of 244) here: https://www.amazon.com/Hum-Novel-Helen-Phillips/dp/1668008831/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.rzmz7-qhx4R52Xvx9fABFg.MGra7GJHoUQlOjEOHpxun_-8lQVutXAg7UbFoIgEj6Q&dib_tag=se&hvadid=700283318859&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1027070&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=16756753293554326182&hvtargid=kwd-2500733804592&hydadcr=22561_13531225&keywords=hum+by+helen+phillips&qid=1733762135&sr=8-1&asin=1668008831&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1 https://www.amazon.com/Hum-Novel-Helen-Phillips/dp/166800883...

hcaz 2y ago
Added to my read-list
- beretguy 2y ago
  Added to my weekend project to implement list.
pempem 2y ago
Immediate add! This is so interesting Hopefully folks understand that this is dystopian rather than a roadmap to their next product proposal

nonameiguess 2y ago

I don't suppose anyone here knows the answer, but claims of matching accuracy like this make me wonder why basic touch ID so often fails and I need to delete my fingerprints and re-enroll. I always figured it was because of rock climbing tearing up my fingers and making the prints gradually different enough that they no longer match. Is it really easier to fool a fingerprint match than a face match? Or was I just wrong all along and the sensors suck? But if the sensors suck, why does deleting and re-enrolling work?

JimmyWilliams1 2y ago

[dead]

LinuxBender 2y ago

How much do I need to change my face to avoid facial recognition? Taboo opinions inspired by W.O.P.R. Avoid playing the game: - Stay clear of areas with cameras when possible. Revenue impacting. - Do Zoom or Jitsi calls with businesses and associates when you can. - Become self sufficient. Stop spending money when it is not required and have healthy groceries delivered to you. Reduce tax revenue. - Work from home if your company permits it. Go mostly off grid. - Hire someone to run errands for you when they can not be avoided. Pay cash to a neighbors kid to run into town. I know none of this will be popular with anyone but I am that guy.

wkat4242 2y ago

> I think during the pandemic they changed the systems to rely heavily on the shape of people’s eyes, because so many people were wearing masks over their noses and mouths. I don’t honestly know how people could realistically change the shape of their eyes to fool these systems. Eh party contacts maybe? I use those a lot.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nitwit005 2y ago

> I think you could not realistically change your face to fool state-of-the-art facial recognition. I think during the pandemic they changed the systems to rely heavily on the shape of people’s eyes, because so many people were wearing masks over their noses and mouths. I don’t honestly know how people could realistically change the shape of their eyes to fool these systems. There are multiple common cosmetic surgeries that involve eye shape. > And now your face won’t match your driver’s license or passport, so traveling will be really difficult for you. So, honestly, why bother? My drivers license photo went un-updated for over a decade. I didn't look remotely similar to my teenage self, and not a single person cared. Excepting one airport security person who commented on how old the photo was.