ANONYMOUS/ HOW TO BEAT FACIAL RECOGNITION.LEGALLY. How to Beat Facial-Recognition Software - Technology & science - Security. Over the last decade, computers have become better at seeing faces.
Software can tell if a camera has a face in its frame of vision, and law enforcement has been testing facial-recognition programs that can supposedly pick out suspects in a crowd. That's prompted an arms race between the people who build facial-recognition systems — and those seeking ways to defeat them. Facial-recognition software is becoming a bigger issue for privacy advocates as well. Surveillance cameras are already ubiquitous in the U.K., are showing up in more places in the U.S. and may increasingly be connected to facial-recognition systems. "I went to a Kinko's a while ago," said Alex Kilpatrick, chief technology officer and co-founder of Tactical Information Systems, a company in Austin, Texas, that sells facial-recognition software to law enforcement and the military.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has said it is deeply concerned with the way facial-recognition systems are used. How to Defend Yourself Against Facial Recognition Technology. Facial recognition technology is now just about everywhere we are.
It’s in our phones, social networks, and media management, and this itself carries vast implications. (See this post about how the technology works, where it is, and how legislators and regulators are reacting to it.) But it’s also increasingly used by law enforcement and for surveillance of “public” spaces, as Evgeny Morozov noted in his London Review of Books review of Kelly Gates’ excellent book, “Our Biometric Future.” And many of the practical and labor-saving applications of facial recognition technology (FRT) could equally be applied for repressive or invasive purposes, especially as it becomes more powerful and ubiquitous. Recently, Hitachi Kokusai Electric unveiled a CCTV system that it claims can identify a face against a database of 36 million faces in under a second. Below are some tactical and technological defenses against FRT.
TACTICAL DEFENsES IN PUBLIC Beyond Masks: Other Options for “Fooling” How to Defend Yourself Against Facial Recognition Technology. How to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology. The day when you’ll be able to hold up your phone and identify a stranger through a viewfinder is getting closer.
Google’s Goggles, a mobile app for visual search, has a facial recognition version unreleased to the public, while Israeli startup Face.com’s technology can tag people’s faces in Facebook photos. Facebook even released a basic version of face detection last night, although it doesn’t have recognition. So in a world where technology chips away at our ability to remain anonymous, how does one reclaim some semblance of control?
It turns out there’s actually a pretty simple way around the facial recognition technology available in the market today, according to Adam Harvey, a graduate student at NYU’s ITP (the same program that produced Foursquare chief executive Dennis Crowley and that Twitter’s location guru Raffi Krikorian taught at). “It breaks apart the gestalt of the face,” he said. Harvey says there a couple of projects that could stem from idea.