Facial Recognition Arms Race

https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/tp/2023/05/09925105/1HBHW3EBlQs >Due to its convenience and remarkable accuracy, face recognition technology [1] has been applied in a few interactive intelligent applications such as checking-in and mobile payment. However, existing face recognition systems are vulnerable to presentation attacks (PAs) ranging from print, replay, makeup, 3D-mask, etc. Therefore, both academia and industry have paid extensive attention to developing face anti-spoofing (FAS) technology for securing the face recognition system. As illustrated in Fig. 1, FAS (namely ‘face presentation attack detection’ or ‘face liveness detection’) is an active research topic in computer vision and has received an increasing number of publications in recent years. https://stateline.org/2024/01/10/are-ski-mask-bans-a-crime-fighting-solution-some-cities-say-yes/ >Amid concerns about crime and public safety, at least two major U.S. cities recently considered banning ski masks or balaclavas to prevent criminal behavior, despite a lack of academic research about the effectiveness of such bans. I don't know if fellow lainons have gone out recently, but I've noticed any time I go to a big box store the entrance and exits are covered with cameras connected to a blaring large screen TV facing the customers with green and yellow boxes following he figure and face of each customers they scurry about their day. Not only this, often times there's hardly any human clerks available to check you out when you want to make a purchase, often times forcing you to use the self check out with the cameras recording your face’s every move from a fish eye lens 2 feet away from your face. No one cares. You will often be followed around or outright refused service if you walk in with something that covers all of your face effectively enough to not be data mined. There’s makeup and clear masks that can obfuscate your face without looking like you’re going to rob the place but both domestic and foreign megacorps and academia are actively working to beat these known methods. >What will lainon do when the next boogeyman allows the US and larger first world to implement Chinese levels of everyday surveillance? People are clearly already desensitized to it, judging by how people don’t even notice the cameras anymore. Those few coming up with methods will have to be working constantly to be a step ahead of the corps https://urbanarmor.org/portfolio/miss-my-face/. Boycotting will be increasingly less of a practical solution.

>>25151 I think the end state of this race is the cat catches the mouse. (We are mice) (I have an idea for an optimistic end state as well, see last paragraph. But it seems pretty distant to me, which is bad if it is required to counter much more feasible surveillance tech- but at least it makes playing for time less depressing.) There isn't much you can do at the end of the day if you enter into the territory of a well-funded entity and they have a huge incentive to recognize who you are. What can you possibly do that will prevent all sorts of sensors from ascertaining the shape of your socially-required contours? If humans can do it with eyesight, machines should be able to as well. Hide from the human eyes? Weirdo. Hide from just the computer eyes? Impossible. The only solace is fending off destiny for as long as we can, making it as expensive and infeasible as possible to fund this research. There is probably something to be said about infinite vc capital funding this stuff, the petrodollar, inflation, etc. The pessimist perspective also poses a question to me: if the cats will catch the mice, shouldn't you be judicious when you help the mice? Your clever tricks are one-offs in the long run. If not every person is going to choose to use your solution, you should consider who will actually use your solution and whether now is a good time to spill the beans. If a country here or there enters into a real authoritarian crisis with technological support, your insight would have much greater leverage if you waited until then. Hard to replace all your cameras overnight during civil unrest. Of course, your insights can be independently discovered... Also, if you just put your burnable vulns out there criminals will use them. Not weed smoke criminals, prioritized criminals. People who have big incentives to hide will hide, and people who have big incentives to find will commission countermeasures. Then, everyone gets to face the countermeasures when the old cameras at the supermarket are replaced with new ones. This clearly necessitates creating groups of trustworthy collaborators somehow, and they need to know way more about optics than I do. Here is a one-off: privacy glasses that impair the IR sensors in security cameras. https://www.reflectacles.com/#home I suppose some arguments for optimistic endings could be posed, like if somehow you could mislead *both* human/robot observers into thinking that you have *different* facial features, but you aren't obscuring them. This brings to mind something high tech like an invisible robot clinging onto your face, which I bet is difficult to make. Maybe you could accomplish something like this with some clever trick like a super-skilled makeup-applying robot or glasses that shift your peri-ocular features in a subtle way.

During covid-19 I could just wear a mask but it's illegal to wear masks.

This feels similar to the fear of governments having your fingerprints. Just wear gloves when you do a crime. Rather than stand out by hiding when you're doing normal things, hide your face when you need to.

>>25155 The main problem isn't wanting to commit crime it is wanting privacy and not having your every move creating a profile of you to psychologically analyze. Plus wearing a disguise wont do anything when you're being tracked by your neighbors door cams, street light cams, parking lot cams, in store cams. That's not even including possibility of some areas using cameras in the sky. >>25152 Those glasses are overpriced. You can get cheap welding glasses for like $20 that might work as well. And the reflective thing is same pattern in a certain variety of ultra reflective tape. Anyone have a good camera to test this with?

Those on the other end of the camera have names and addresses.

>>25165 And your nudes thanks to TSA body scans

>>25167 I hope they are liking them.

>>25161 Where would you even equip those glasses? If you go outside wearing them they could trace you by following the trails of camera footage back to your home. That's like using a self-hosted VPN for privacy which I see being suggested more often than not. You're fooling the cameras (the servers see your VPN's IP) but the adversary which has access to the footage of all the cameras (or 95% of the internet, like Team-Cymru) can just trace you back to the first camera that recorded you (established the connection). Maybe you could go to an interstate road, change your clothes, put on the glasses, then go to where you want to go? That's not feasible. If lots of people began using these glasses, then that'd be effective.

>>25253 Well the ones that block IR dont glow they just cant be seen through by an IR cam. I don't think anything that reflects light or emits an IR light would be easy to track because it tends to throw camera white balance off so it literally would have to be manually tracked. Not that it is not possible just likely not something prepared. You probably could do more if you had a powerful IR flashlight that automatically points at and blinds cameras. Im not sure if it would work during day conditions though.

>>25155 >Just wear gloves when you do a crime. This kind of response is all too common and the reason I feel no hope towards the future. Weird to find it here, though not surprised. For some reason people tend to think the only reason to believe in personal privacy is to want the ability to commit crime. What if instead what you want to minimize is the chance to become the victim of a crime? Who knows what the realistic bounds of identity fraud are in the future. What happens when this information gets leaked and some guy is registering websites in your name and using face ID with a perfectly crafted simulation of your face? Perhaps its because as >>25152 brought up, whenever you come up with a trick, the wrong people will tend to use it. If I ever came up with a privacy enhancing solution that could be easily and widely adopted, my hope would be that people would embrace it and make it part of their lives, but realistically people have enough things to worry about in meatspace. The only people who will adopt it are the wrong people using it for the wrong reasons. >>25152 How effective would those be against most hi-def face mapping cameras vs conventional sunglasses? As far as I'm aware, most of the data extracted from your face using those systems is from your nose, mouth and jaw placement. They aren't severely thwarted with glasses. I'm not sure how common iris scanning and 3d IR mapping is out there so far, which is what the IR blocking capability is presumably meant for.

I can't stand university and corporate intellectuals. The pinnacle of empty headed geniuses. They will end the world for the sake of their blind, seemingly neutral "curiosity". I despise Makise Kurisu and Maho Hiyajo for this reason, but they're qts and fake drawings so it's okayish

>>25326 Scientists have always been puppets of governments, get over it already. Civilization didn't even have to exist. We would be perfectly fine living in woods, warning animal hides and hoeing ground with stone tools, if human beings were not genetically malicious scum. The problem is not in scientists, it's in evil human nature itself

>>25328 The majority of humans are not evil. They are just trying to survive and don't have enough mental energy to make it out of the cave at the end of the day. This cynical view of life is exactly how THEY justify what they do.

Here is a paper explaining how data poisoning wont be good enough. I still think data poisoning is good but not as a sole measure https://openreview.net/pdf?id=__sp5PEix2H >>25326 Curiosity is just sales pitch, it's pure greed.

>>25340 >They are just trying to survive and don't have enough mental energy to make it out of the cave at the end of the day This is the very definition of evil that comes from within. That's not to blame you, just stop making up excuses and face yourself for what you are, maybe it will motivate you to change for the better. Food for thought - a society is an array of individuals, an empire is fueled by fear and uncertainty, progress is an attempt to escape the true necessity

>>25350 >we live in a society I just don't see how what you're talking about leads to anything other than the same cynical worldview our oppressors and their lackeys have. When you talk to people with the assumption that they care about a common good for all of humanity, you can move them. When I mean people, I mean your common person with a soul, not the soul sucking pundits and zealots you see in the majority of mass broadcasted human discourse.

>>25351 > our oppressors Nobody oppresses you. I bet you live in a first world country. You have no idea what it feels like when somebody actually oppresses you first worlder.

yeah if 'a certain group of primates' that are already error-prone with facial recognition, would get their act together and stop writing their IDIOTIC tag names and start aiming "UP" and on target, we could make mass surveillance cost prohibitive what is so great about wildstyle, bro its from the 1970's, move along vandalism needs to address the needs of the 21st century

>>25792 third world has more freedom that first world. Uk&germany are top contenders in restrictive regulations