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Comment by threecheese | Hacker News Reader

I am hoping for an urban camouflage fashion revolution as a response to more pervasive monitoring: https://www.axios.com/2019/09/07/fooling-facial-recognition-...

Public access to object recognition models may be important.

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I'd like to see that too, but time and time again we've seen that:

a) laypeople aren't usually moved by privacy violations more abstract than someone physically watching you do something.

b) most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy.

c) safety gear generally isn't considered sexy

I think that this stuff would be perceived like wearing a physical bike helmet for your data privacy with all the cachet of Google Glass.

> most people aren't willing to don practical accessories that noticably change the perception of your face unless it emphasizes qualities considered sexy.

Ironic related story in the news:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/08/29/passport-ph...

Also d) it's easier to update face recognition ML to see through the latest in camouflage fashion than to design, manufacture and sell new clothes after each update to the ML model. Especially that they need to keep fooling previous versions of the model too.

Does gait recognition (and body tics / unique movement style) not make this moot?

My sense is that facial recognition is a stop-gap and soon to be superseded, because the tech is there for more holistic 'reads' of a person - And that those subtle things that we humans can't see are actually plain as day and as clear as a fingerprint.

If we cover our face, then the data collected on gait etc. will be more than enough. If we adopt a different gait, then the data on other foibles and styles will then give us away. Etc. (we can't hope to disguise all of these at once)

A couple of years ago there were news articles that the pentagon has a "lasers that can identify people in a crowd from 200m away based on their heart rate signatures".

No idea if that's true or overblown, but it doesnt seem unlikely that such technology becomes possible in the future.

From where did they obtain your or my "heart signature"? What about gait, etc.?

you can pull a heart rate from color amplification, same basic idea as motion amplification.

Surely object recognition models will catch up to whatever attempts to thwart it (especially if it becomes popular). As long as a person is recognizable to another person, a computer should also be able to recognize them.

Trying to camouflage seems like a losing battle.

Computers are a lot better at recognizing people than people. Simple things like your gait are enough.

Muslim women know. how is this controlling Gilde called in Dune again?

surely there are simpler ways of course if you've dealt with most hoodish ruffians, as the names tells us, the people of the hood love to wear hoodies - which generally work quite well to hide from cameras, especially those above, if the hood sags forward and over the face somewhat or these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses

or outside or alongside hoodies, these can be seen as socially acceptable (mostly) ; https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/07/mask-of-your-own-fa...

I think it's safe to assume that 0.0000001% of the population will bother with that.

Just FYI, it is illegal to mask your face in New York https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna168590

No, that's Nassau County, New York. Not the entirety of New York. Says it right there in the article you linked. There's also a lawsuit challenging it, also linked at the end of the article.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-lawsuit-challen...

So it is illegal to wear a hijab / niqab?

To be clear, a baseball hides more of your face than a hijab. (Niqab is a different story.)

Answered in the article:

> However, it has exemptions for health and religious reasons.

I did not see that. I double checked just now and there are still zero results for "religious", not sure why.

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