Hacking your face to dodge the rise of facial recognition tech | Hacker News Reader

Hacking your face to dodge the rise of facial recognition tech

wired.co.uk

114 pointstosh65 comments

Here's a pet peeve of mine: The critique of increasing mass surveillance focuses too much on technological problems and abuses by individual humans.

A fully-functioning, automated surveillance society with minimal potential for abuse by individual police etc. would be much worse than the partially-working systems we have now. A surveillance society is the antithesis of a free, democratic society.

The underlying assumption of mass surveillance is that the individuals in societies can not be trusted to work for the best of the society and must be left no option but to conform to the law. This is in stark contrast to the idea that citizens generally see their society as something they wish to preserve, and legislation and law enforcement exists to modify incentives in cases where altruism, self-interest and a sense of social responsibility are insufficient to keep order.

In other words, to support a surveillance society is to give up on the foundations of a democratic society that works to support the goals of its citizens, in favour of a society that treats its citizens as subjects to be ruled over.

This is, of course, a much harder political argument to make than "the tech doesn't work", but it's an argument that needs to be made because one day, the tech will work.

Good point about the underlying assumption and thanks for making it. I think the more people in a room that remember it, when decisions get taken, the better are the decisions that get made.

I'm not a psychologist, but I'd imagine treating people as if they will do no good (unless surveilled and controlled so that they have no option but to behave in the manner which the surveillors/controllers wish them to) will foster a mindset that society is not something people would choose to build themselves without oversight. Because if they would, then why do we need all the cameras and security?

can a democratic society vote itself into a dictatorship? what if some citizens want to subvert democracy and liberal social norms, but do so democratically? democracy is a discussion of ideas. it is your job to convince people that freedom is advantageous to global governance or that they can be combined.

with freedom you will get fracture and economic decline, conflict and instability. with global governance you will get a monopoly on stable world trade and endless economic and civic prosperity, as the best ideas will be rapidly adopted by the most number of people, ensuring benefit for all generations of mankind yet unborn.

what if it turns out that your perception of freedom is not maximal freedom unless people freely choose it? and if they abandon it (for what you might consider a type of mental slavery) to a dynamic but perpetual system of control-information with new benefits far outweigh any negative consequences, like the ability to understand all preceding human knowledge in one lifespan or avoid all disease and aging related problems.

humanity once we reached the age of writing, became the game of convincing other people to think and act alike. i cant think of a more illiberal and limiting idea than what i am doing right now - forcing my words into your head - yet this is the structure upon which everything we see has been built.

you will find yourself in an increasingly marginalized position, and eventually your views will be silenced, as they should. you may be civilized, but barely register as a barbarian for what is to come, which will take yet more centuries to unfold.

(28m42s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TQZ-2iMUR0

A democracy in theory can do anything if the sole description is democratic choice.

However in practice you have constitutions and inalienable rights which would prevent a dictatorship from being voted in. Unless of course you everyone involved is okay with breaking the law to gain control.

> legislation and law enforcement exists to modify incentives in cases where altruism, self-interest and a sense of social responsibility are insufficient to keep order.

Here's an argument I've read many times.

Within a few decades technological advances might bring us to a point where a handful of people can cause truly extraordinary destruction. Modern law enforcement and intelligence is not designed to deal with damage capabilities on that scale. If we want the society to remain free of overwhelming surveillance, we must hope that another mechanism will emerge to counter that risk.

What do you think such a "social preservation" mechanism might look like?

Leigh Bowery was a dazzling face (and body) hacking visionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Bowery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxbqk7xjA5o

https://nl.pinterest.com/orchidsatellite/leigh-bowery-stylin...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3yVBhVrltU

Edit: (bigbangchina: I wouldn't exactly characterize Wigstock as a "feminist gathering"...)

He was the main inspiration of the Tranimal movement, which also gives facial recognition systems a hard time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranimal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_vZ9P2LSRs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqoN3AUdl0k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atKmBOnjpzQ

This is going to lead to a great episode of British political theatre.

The burqa is an effective counter measure. Full body, with a mesh eye opening.

The UK is either going to have to ban the burqa in public, at the price of being called an islamiphobic nation.

Or continue to allow the burqa, and watch as it becomes the new cartoon criminal outfit, and acknowledge that The Government has established policies favorable to Islam over other religions.

Get your popcorn and TV license ready.

What about allowing burqas, but requiring a "license plate" to be affixed?

Plausible. Rfid or some other pingable ID marker.

You'll still get a fight about something physically visible though. Too much Jew with a gold star connotation.

Now I've got a lot of off color jokes about IoT burqas in my head.

Kind of an interesting connection there, hard to say that having a marking on your burqa somehow makes it more obvious you're a Muslim.

Would be weird to walk around with a licence plate style identifier though, since anyone could scan it and follow you rather than just someone with a massive facial recognition database.

honestly the thing I don't like about facial recognition is that it could somehow become mandatory in a country where you're not even required to carry any kind of national ID unless you're driving, and it's suddenly your problem if a facial recognition system you didn't consent to can't recognise you.

It becomes mandatory and the "social credit" system follows shortly thereafter.

You stop being an individual and become a cog in the national machine.

How would you verify the person in the burqa is the licensee?

Same way you verify if the person driving a car is the owner. They're legally responsible for the vehicle unless they can prove they weren't at the wheel.

But the real question is, why do you need to verify the person in the first place, unless they are suspected of committing a crime?

Serious comment: We all carry around a license plate almost all the time - your phone. The data harvested by your phone (all of which is accessible to authorities) provides a complete history of you (ref. intended), where you've been, who you've met, and a proxy for what you're thinking about.

How long before it's mandatory to carry one?

Probably soon. If only because of digital payments pretty much phasing out cash.

The burqa is extremely unpractical to commit crimes, since actual visibility is very limited in practice. It’s akin to horse’s blinders. This is why it’s pretty unpopular even with Islamic women, who tend to prefer headscarves, even if they take longer to set up at first.

Even if you can occlude your facial features, you're probably still licked if the particular implementation has gait analysis. We need to develop a fremen-style movement system to subvert the sandworms, I mean surveillance

Stick a pebble in your shoe.

Or bruise your heel or sole.

Time frame. I can remove a stone quickly. I cannot remove a bruised heel quickly.

As much as I like the Fremen aesthetic, we should probably accept that when most of us attempt to walk without rhythm, we might succeed in not attracting the worm, but end up looking like a civil servant from the Ministry of Silly Walks in the process.

Still, if that means the surveillance system concludes that we're all John Cleese…

If you walk without rhythm, you'll never learn though.

I guess Kaiser Souse knew what would happen.

It's sad we have to hide from our 'elected' western government.

I agree with you completely; I opt out of the scanners at the airport every time on that very principle alone. But, I would also assert that most people would not agree that "we have to hide".

Tried that once. Got the German shepherd scanner instead.

Where was that? I've only ever experienced the "advanced patdown".

This was on the way from our hometown in the midwest to points Scandinavian. While this was going on, my daughter got the "advanced patdown," and she still mentions it when I bring up traveling :( Went from loving it to not interested.

There's so much human effort directed at developing sci-fi level technologies to target advertising and eventually help sell you crap you don't need. We could have Mars colonies by now if that effort wasn't wasted on something so meaningless.

Corporate greed has no bounds.

Face hacking doesn't necessarily have to be hi-tech. Maybe more and more people in future will dress like activists. Mouth mask may become an important fashion piece, which is already happening in East Asian societies.

I've read that wearing masks in public is illegal in the US.

The laws that made public mask wearing illegal were from an age when the KKK used masks to hide themselves when committing violent crimes and for intimidation purposes.

Sorry for the confusion, I made a typo, I meant to say mouth mask. https://qz.com/299003/a-quick-history-of-why-asians-wear-sur...

It's not just illegal, I believe it's a felony in my state.

Except on Halloween? What about on your way to a masquerade party?

Carrying open containers of alcohol isn't legal to from a party either.

It's a felony in Virginia. (I believe it's a Class IV felony.) A police officer I knew said it was historically a response to the KKK; but, now, it was used as an additional charge you could "drop" in a plea bargain. I don't know how true that is; but, it does make some sense.

The fundamental issue with all surveillance mechanisms is that it's the exact opposite of foundational legal principles like presumption of innocence. [1] If anyone or everyone could be guilty of something if only they were caught in the act, and if judges accept such evidence as prime and override any suspicions that these are beyond reasonable doubt and ignore the fact that these could have error rates or be completely falsified, [2] then law enforcement and prosecution wouldn't have to work hard. It's questionable if law enforcement really works hard in any country and does what it's expected to by the common people; it seems to be a continuous power game (and power grab) in many places where law enforcement is becoming more and more militarized.

Biometric and behavioral recognition, profiling and tracking will turn all democracies into namesakes and into dictatorships where people will always self-censor because they don't want to get into any trouble. There is a bigger chance that more (not all) activists will be marginalized and silenced through different means. That would be a tragedy for everyone. "Nothing to hide" would seem like a cruel joke that thoughtless people of the past played on the future.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence

[2]: Even routine evidence collected and processed today could have error rates or be falsified, but there seem to be trends where technology is perceived as being infallible, and is trusted completely on first sight.

In case if anyone is interested, publicly known face recognition algorithms usually require a photo to have at least 50 px between eyes. The article says that the system used by police has 90% error rate and this is surprisingly poor result.

For comparison, an article about Russian photographer [1] says that he managed to recognise approximately 70% of people he took photo (he was recognising people in the subway to show how different people look in social networks and in real life; useless research in my opinion).

If you would like to check it for yourself, you can try demos like searchface [2] - it has indexed most of the photos from the popular social network vk.com.

I think the laws should be adapted to make face recognition illegal. Otherwise businesses and governments will want to be able to identify the citizens or customers, to collect and sell detailed data about them.

[1] https://advox.globalvoices.org/2016/04/07/the-russian-art-of...

[2] http://searchface.ru/

I would just use a baseball hat and sunglasses which at least doesn't shout "hey, I'm actively combating facial recognition tech", look at me.

Also, if you use an obfuscation tool like this, you would mark yourself for closer inspection by human wetware which makes this approach counter productive.

The world seems to become more and more like Minority Report every day I read an article like this.

"Hacking your face to dodge the rise of facial recognition"? I mean, it's not that it wouldn't work, in a way - but it strikes me as a rather gruesome approach!

>And while FR may be error-prone now, this is unlikely to stay the case for long.

Well less error prone. There are only so many different possible faces. Even people will routinely misidentify faces in a crowd. They need to use hair, clothing and context to avoid constantly saying hello to strangers.

There will always be a reasonably high level of false positives...

The self checkout lines in walmart and target have a HD camera right in your face. I have always found these disturbing, they aren't even looking at what I'm buying. Do you guys think they are using facial recognition on these streams?

Most modern checkout experiences can identify you with very high accuracy sans-camera, so I doubt it.

What percentage of shoppers are already carrying the store's loyalty card and are willingly presenting it at the checkout?

What percentage of shoppers have the store's app loaded on their smartphone and carry that willing around too?

I went to the mall last week for the first time in ages. About half of the directories were replaced with signs telling you to install the Westfield shopping app, for "TURN BY TURN DIRECTIONS" through the mall. Like, really? There are only 2 walkways through the mall...

I cover these up with a bag before getting close to being in view...

"an array of tiny infrared LEDs wired to the inside of a baseball cap"

I had that idea some years ago, but using instead big powerful IR LEDs around a hat or cap to create a sort of white halo around the entire head. Never tested it...

This works but gets you kicked out of all malls and supermarkets.

For women it might be easier if the LEDs are built into a hair accessory like a hairband. Less of a social stigma than a baseball cap. Glasses work too of course.

(Heh. I used Wikipedia to verify the spelling of 'hair band', but ended up on a page about Glam Metal.)

As if men can't walk around with some led-outfitted metal heads.

It might also be useful under the belt, e.g. on skirts or underwears, to thwart upskirting attempts.

Naomi Wu (@realsexycyborg) recently demo'd a "downskirt" cam for similar purposes. It basically shows the back of the legs and functions like a back-up camera on a vehicle.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/103896197816802918... (slightly nsfw)

Thank you for giving me a compelling reason to try this. I have a stash of IR LEDs lying about and I've been intending to experiment with and IR-decorated hat for a good while now, but basically been too lazy. Now I have to try it!

You're gonna notice security guards following you while talking on the radio the minute you turn it on, but God bless you.

Depending on your stash, why stopping at the hat? You can go full body IR and with a good IR-sensible camera you can achieve some nice (and fake and youtube-clicky) "poltergeist" videos!

> gets you kicked out of all malls and supermarkets

Which is part of the much wider issue of "pseudo public spaces" - spaces which feel like they're public but which aren't:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-017-0048-6

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseu...

I built one years ago too. The issue is that many cameras nowadays have IR filters on them.

A link in the article about getting a 3D-printed model of someone else's face makes me wonder how long before the Yellow-vests in France figure this out and print out a copy of Macron's face to use in their protests?

i am sure that in a few years most of people will hide face behind AR mask anyway.

but there is lots of ways to recognize people against their will, combination of height walking style, radio signals from wearables, and maybe even odor

coincidence that this appeared at the same time as https://qz.com/299003/a-quick-history-of-why-asians-wear-sur... ?

I think not...

need to get one of them hyperface scarves...

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