Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may work itself into the mainstream despite it's questionable ethics.
Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings).
I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct.
An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will definitely be mentioned at some point.
Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the resources to pursue bullshit like this.
Here's the relevant law for Virginia.
https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title18.2/chapter9/secti...
It's a class 6 felony, which in VA means you'll be looking at "a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than five years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both".
It doesn't say I can't wear traditional holiday costume outside of holiday, so it should be okay to wear Halloween scary costume all year long.
Perhaps you ought to dress up as Santa Claus when you want to rob a bank, then
It also doesn't cover face confusing makeup. You're not hiding your features, just adding a bunch of fake ones.
What disaster in the VA legislature led to this law?
(Anyone who wonders why France is unique in having such a law should remember that France changed hands between Protestant and Catholic monarchs roughly two dozen times, and each time there was a mini-crusade, with citizens of the religion-in-power urged to "coerce" citizens of the religion-out-of-power to converting with whatever means necessary. That died down enough that there was never a law made to stop it at the time, but France saw the potential for such cyclical violence to begin again when it joined the EU and began getting increasing levels of immigration from non-Christian cultures, and so figured that such a law was long past due.)
One item is signalling your religion, the other is covering your face. Neither item is covering your face in a way that signals your religion.
I feel like any attempt at imposing anti-privacy laws while keeping some pretence of a free society ultimately descends into farce, because the two ideas are basically incompatible.
You can't wear the cross necklace, or have the bumper-sticker; they signal religion. And you can wear the halloween mask, or the welding mask; they don't signal religion. There's nothing more to it than that, and there's no complex interaction.
If you can still see the hijab under the welding mask (and you can; the welding mask doesn't cover the back of your head, or your neck) then the hijab has gotta go. (And, to be extra clear, it's a unilateral rule: nuns and priests can't wear their vestments in public either! They've gotta change into them at the church/nunnery, and change back before they leave.)
On the other hand, if you wear a cross necklace under your clothes where nobody can see it, that's perfectly fine. Because, again, the point is that you can't signal your religion. The symbols aren't against the law; displaying them is.
And so, actually, wearing a hijab would be fine if you wear, say, a motorcycle helmet over your head, and a bandana over the lower half of your face. You're covering all the same area—but, because nobody can tell that you're wearing a hijab, and because neither a motorcycle helmet nor a bandana signal religious affiliation, you're fine. The symbol is hidden, like the cross under your clothes is hidden.
(Interestingly, since the point of the hijab tradition is to cover these areas, not to look a specific way, anything that covers these areas is "functionally" still a hijab as far as Islamic social norms are concerned. So wearing just the motorcycle helmet + bandana would actually be a perfectly legitimate way to cohere to your religious beliefs, without [legibly] signalling your religion. ...until, that is, every Muslim woman started doing it; then it'd become a legible religious symbol, and so be banned as well.)
The Wikipedia article suggests it’s a straightforward ban on covering the face, not as you describe.
So in fact the welding mask or motorcycle helmet would be illegal (in a public place). The hijab would be irrelevant.
I still think it’s a bad law, but at least it seems basically consistent.
Are we talking about different laws? Is there a different one about signalling your religion?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering
EDIT: I think we are indeed talking about different laws. You’re referring to an older one that bans religious symbolism in public institutions. So what you describe is correct, when we’re talking about schools and hospitals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in...
That's such hilariously appalling logic. "What's the common thread in all hate crimes? That's right--minorities! If we force the minorities to stay undercover, no one will be able to attack them! Problem solved."
2 - eyes and the facial geometry around them are secondary, so no nose and giant movie star sunglasses adds to the machines confusion
3 - collar worn sparkle lighting directed upwards is baffling to machine - silly things keep picking up the light sparkles on the face as feature points (heh)
4 - makeup patterns based on the WW2 ship camouflage mess up geometry detection
Now, all of that will defeat a simple recognizer but if the developers had a lick of sense, the system will still pop it out as anomalous.
Mission impossible facial masks could certainly help, but pretty much everyone is removing the IR filters at this point and the facial thermography would be all messed up
Then there's all the work going on in recognizing more than just a face - I've seen some stuff on incorporating more of the body into the recognition pattern (I've always wanted to watch one of those systems misrecognize Mitch McConnell as a turtle :-) As the available horsepower continues to expand, more of the totality of the individual can be recognized (my own accidental contribution to this is that cheap stereoscopic vision makes it a lot easier/more accurater to pick out foreground from background) At the end of the day, I think Scott McNeally had it right in the '90s - "You have no privacy. Get over it" I am of mixed minds about this stuff in public spaces, the good and bad examples are evenly distributed
The local cancer society came to my workplace to promote skin health and one of the items was a small camera system. You put sun block on one part of your face, stuck your head in a box and a camera and screen showed the sunblock as black paint.
If an IR type of material could be made you could paint geometric dazzle type paint on your face to obscure its geometry.
So it sounds like these types of strategies need to be turned into fashion trends in order to make the anomalies not so anomalous?
I see what you did there :)
> Research Article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf
> Video for patches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4
However, today [not] using an ad-blocker is as ethically questionable as having [un]protected sex with a stranger. There isn't a single ad network that does not, every now and then, dish out drive by malware.
In the future, simply entering a store with CCTV is an opt-in for FR analytics and all that entails.
It's one thing to wear a "face mod" because you're paranoid - it's quite another to wear one because your favorite celebrity does.