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Comment by dweinus | Hacker News Reader

Good write up. Still I gotta say: a N95 mask will do the trick for cheap, with side bonus of also blocking flu & covid!

The answer to 'I don't agree with this' is not 'do something that lets me bypass it while they do it to everyone else until it becomes normalized' it is 'make them stop doing it'.

Well you could stand outside and hand out N95 masks to spread awareness. That isn’t doing nothing to fix the issue.

There are cameras (software, really) that can recognize you with a high degree of accuracy, despite you wearing a mask.

Why wouldn't they just do gait analysis?

Because that isn’t a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Surveillance

It may not be an issue for you at the moment, but outright dismissal will not keep you safe.

I work in this space and have for quite a while. There is no productized gait analysis software available to the commercial markets.

Surely archived footage would be ripe for automated analysis once the tools are commercialized.

Yes, in the same way stored passwords of today may eventually be broken by the quantum computing tools of tomorrow.

The post I replied to implied that gait analysis is a viable alternative option. Gait analysis is not an option today, or this year, or even in the next decade. There is no data supporting the claim that it can be done reliably enough to get down to practical reidentification use cases.

prohibitively expensive

I don't know your financial situation but a N95 mask can't cost you more than 10$? I can find 10 packs for less than 10$. You can even reuse your shopping mask since you primary point is privacy and not air borne pathogens.

You can still reuse N95s for airborne pathogens as long as they fit well, but I believe that user was referring to gait analysis being too expensive.

Shoe stone.

Or a tack - in case Wegmans tries to pull a polygraph on you.

It’s unreliable and difficult. The most recent failure (made the news) was the laughable attempt to link the J6 bomber to a random police officer. Gait analysis belongs in the movies or maybe in some one-off national security investigation where nothing else is available.

Some places that would do face recognition would not do gait analysis, and so you defeat those. Additionally, if you prevent them from doing face recognition and they can do gait recognition, they will be forced to use gait recognition, which is likely more expensive or less reliable, which will limit their ability to do it in a widespread fashion or cost them more to do so.

Think of it like cloudflare in reverse. The less of your identity you passively provide cloudflare, the more they will hinder and punish you and your CPU before letting you through to the website. If they make it burdensome enough, you may give in and give over your private data or not access the website at all.

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