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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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