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Comment by qrbLPHiKpiux | Hacker News Reader

Change your gait, too. Walk with a cane.

You can apply for a grant to develop a new gait at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_of_Silly_Walks

You’d need to change your cane and you might just develop a new gait based on the cane. Maybe learn to walk like a Fremen.

Put a little stone in your shoe every once in a while. It'll change your gait for you at the cost of discomfort whenever you walk.

This tactic is used in _Little Brother_ by Cory Doctorow.

I can no longer tell if this is serious advice.

CIA chief of disguise, at 4m35s:

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8

Make a cane which changes in length every 3-5 minutes via a small internal piston.

Is there any evidence that mass scale gait analysis is done anywhere? Or is this just paranoia about something that could happen, perhaps in the future?

There's no telling what type of data analysis might be possible in the future when applied to historical data.

Its allegedly been trialed/used in china for a few years now. First quality result https://www.privacy-ticker.com/chinese-police-uses-gait-reco...

No evidence but anyone could do it right now on the numerous public cctv feeds and even more plentiful non-public feeds on shodan

Not exactly gait, but this helps you identify individuals based on movement patterns: https://gitlab.com/polavieja_lab/idtrackerai

Yeah I would imagine that gait analysis is not anywhere near 99.9% accurate.

Faceblind people routinely use things like gait to recognize people.

Some people have very distinctive gaits. When I was married to a soldier, I could pick him out of a sea of men in identical uniforms from the back based on his gait.

I'm slightly face-blind (have trouble remembering faces) and it is not substituted with any other cues. Also bad at names. Really sometimes I will just get super confused and surprised. It is occasionally embarrassing.

I guess I should have explicitly said "some" faceblind people. It wasn't intended to implicitly suggest "all" by not saying that.

Edit: Can people not downvote that comment? I'm pretty confident it wasn't intended to be fighty. It was just a faceblind person wanting to talk about a topic they know personally. Goodness.

I'm having a shit day. Blame Me instead.

Thank you.

I think it extends to more than just walking. I snowboard as much as I can during the winter, and I can reliably pick out people I know from extreme distances just by how they ride. The posture, size of the person, and other traits all add together to be a fairly unique signature.

I don't think any identifier used is really 99.9% accurate. Even DNA tests, a 1 in 1000 chance is probably far below the amount caused by human error.

Reminds me of the story "Understand" by Ted Chiang. The protagonist gains super intelligence, and subsequently becomes a person of interest for the feds. One of his tactics to hide his identity was to change his gait and overall demeanor.

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