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Once this technique becomes more widespread, get ready for laws that make it illegal to fool facial recognition, similar to wearing masks, etc.

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I would imagine there is a pretty strong first amendment case against such laws in the United States. Mask laws have been successfully challenged on those grounds (though sometimes the challenges have been unsuccessful).

Your bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat or sunglasses.

"No shoes, no shirt, no service" has also been a thing for as long as convenience stores have been around.

Not that far of a stretch to think this will ultimately extend to face paint.

If you want true anonymity, just wear a motorcyle helmet everywhere. We still don't know who The Stig is.

Sure, but your bank is a private institution, not the government.

is there really a big difference? the government has a right to any data the bank collects about you

There is a huge difference - a monopoly on violence and control over public places.

> the government has a right to any data the bank collects about you

This is not true in the US. Banks certainly have a right to give any information you've given them to the government though.

My bank doesn't operate any prisons?

I thought we learned who the first Stig was, out of show, and then they replaced him with someone else. I seem to recall reading that here a few years back.

A couple of Stigs actually have been revealed per the Wiki on the character -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stig -- Perry McCarthy (black Stig) and Ben Collins (first white Stig). Both were revealed out of show of course.

We don't know who the current Stig is and it's entirely possible in my opinion that there have been "stand in Stigs" as well. Obscuring the face with a tinted-shield racing helmet eliminates a big method people tell others apart. You'd have to rely on clues like height / build instead. Makes it easier to swap out drivers for that character.

Obviously a public square isn't a bank.

> Your bank will likely not let you in if you're wearing a hat

I've never heard of this.

> "No shoes, no shirt"

That's health code, not appearance.

Banks frequently have signs saying you can't wear a hat, sunglasses, or masks, for what I think should be obvious reasons

>I've never heard of this.

There's a rap record label in the UK called "No Hats No Hoods", because of the ubiquity of that sign in certain parts of London.

https://nohatsnohoods.bandcamp.com/

OK, but it's not a thing in the US. I pretty much always wear dark glasses and a big floppy hat in the summer, and have never been challenged at my bank. But then, maybe that's because I'm that guy in that hat ;)

Its a thing in the US. If you havent been challenged, its because you dont live in one of its many ghettoes.

Try entering whilst wearing a motorcycle helmet.

I'm American. I can confirm my bank has a sign that says "no hats, no hoods, no sunglasses" on the door. The enforcement seems lax; if you have certian skin colors at least.

Huh. Maybe I've just never seen the sign. Or maybe they don't have such signs in my sleepy little town. And then, there's the fact that I'm an old ~white guy, and everyone knows me. I mean, I have received mail with no street address. Just name, city, state and five-digit postal code :)

But here's the thing: Nobody except my ISP even knows that I use a VPN. Nobody knows that I'm interested in online privacy and security issues. Because I only get into that online, using VPNs and Tor.

>> "No shoes, no shirt"

>That's health code, not appearance.

There's no such health code. At least the "shoes" part has been thoroughly researched:

http://www.barefooters.org/health-codes-and-osha/

I strongly support anti-mask laws... especially in situations when you have two political opponents coming up to one another in the streets. Masks make it way too easy for some kind of provocateur to instigate fights or start a stampede. And this may be egged on my professional dark PR/intelligence people to make one side or another look good/bad.

It's a tough thing to defend on legal grounds because you have to explain how mask laws don't violate the first amendment. There could be some justification that would hold up, but as far as I know the issue hasn't gone before the Supreme Court.

You'd have to explain how they do. It's not prima facie(ha!) obvious that a face mask is "speech"

Realistically, I think your right to free expression is threatened by the way you can be targeted for harassment or fired if you exercise it, and the mask is one simple remedy. Basically it makes sense for the same reason the anonymous ballot does. No less plausible than the idea that your freedom of speech is abridged if you can't donate millions of dollars to a political campaign.

Mask laws were in place in some areas with a historic Ku Klux Klan presence.

Yep, which shows why some of the recent push to criminalize hate speech is problematic: it's used to target fringe groups most people don't like now, but in the future it could be used against anyone else, similar to how mask laws have been used against protesters more recently.

No. It won't. We'll just get used to it. Face identification was solved decades ago. Since then, it has just been a rat race between "what about this occlusion or this one?" Train a Neural Net to do Paint to Skin replacement, or Adobe's context aware brush to remove overly gel'd hair (the cvdazzle linke).

Beards and 2010 Justin Bieber hair cuts halted face recognition 10 years ago. How do I know, because I had to manually label 10,000 frames with 200+ points because the "automatic landmarking tool" didn't put everything in the right spot.

Biometric security is, and always will be, a rat race. Once faces are handled / ruled out, they've move to the iris (30ft/10m iris extract was possible 10 years ago). After the iris (cause everyone will wear Black Mirror contacts or something), they'll move to gait analysis. My thesis was on identifying people based on the facial movements.

The point is, at some point, they're not going to "make it illegal" because it'd be improbable for everyone to adopt this cyberpunk fashion. Plus, their are enough other ways to identify someone as someone than the face that most future systems will likely be a combination of all of them using some level of confidence.

Denmark did this recently with any type of face-covering, and judging by how Reddit gushed over the decision it should be no trouble to enact similar legislation elsewhere:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/31/europe/denmark-face-veil-...

The FBI already criminalized juggalos years ago.

or burkas.

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