You would want to test the camo. I suspect there is more than just changing ones appearance. I believe I've seen a story talking about not needing to see the entire face. You can still id people wearing neck gaiters and other face coverings if you can make out the facial contour. I think you needed about a third of the face uncovered. https://hyperverge.co/blog/masked-face-recognition/
Here's the thing about "fucking magnets; how do they work?" How do magnets work? No less a science communicator than Richard Feynman—he of the rubber sheet gravity spacetime analogy—had no analogy to communicate why ferromagnetism creates attraction and repulsion. Here's his incredibly shaggy dog non-answer to the question about how magnets work wherein he says that there are no pat answers to "why" questions. He gets to the money line: "I cannot explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
So I will defend that line in the song. I will only accept answers from people who can explain why ferromagnetism works to me assuming I know how electromagnets create magnetic fields.
Shamelessly hijacking this story to recommend The Private Eye digital comic [0]. Set in a future where everyone has normalised the wearing of masks in public to preserve their anonymity. The protagonist refuses to get a driving license because he wouldn't want a photo of himself in a database.
Thanks for that! Vaughan is great. It's funny that it's a digital release considering the topic. That small sense of unease I feel each time I feed my personal and credit card data into yet another website should only enhance the experience.
Ever since Covid, people are obscuring their faces in public more often. I especially see gig workers wearing balaclavas. Partially for sun and wind protection, but potentially for anonymity
I would also add the Netflix movie "Anon" which came out in 2018:
In the near future, humanity lives in a technologically advanced, dystopian society. The government requires that everyone receive an ocular implant that records everything they see. The implant provides an augmented-reality head-up display to the user with information about anyone and anything they may see, as well as recording the user's view. Investigations into crimes amount to detectives reviewing video and assessing whether an alleged perpetrator is innocent or guilty.
Sal Friedland, a detective with the metropolitan police force, crosses paths with a young woman who appears to trigger a glitch in his ocular implant, as no data about her is retrieved. When he reviews his own record of that day, he finds that every single frame of her has been mysteriously deleted. At work, Sal is handed several homicide cases where the victims' own visual records of their deaths are replaced with the killer's point of view, thus hiding the killer's identity. At another murder scene, Sal chases the apparent killer only to nearly be killed when they hack his implant and change what he sees in real time.
I’m more curious about how robust this is against modern systems.
A lot of newer facial recognition models are trained on occlusions, masks, and heavy makeup — so this might be less effective than people assume.
Not surprising at all. It's a form of dazzle camouflage that has previously been shown to confuse facial recognition[0]. It's probably possible to design it to be more effective yet less intrusive than juggalo makeup.
I would have actually expected it to be more popular by now.
Isn't being non-white good enough to not be identified as you? Sure, you might get identified as someone else altogether, but that's moving the goal posts from just not being identified. /s
I'll make sure to wear my Juggalo makeup the next time I visit China to avoid their face scanning technology. That'll surely help me blend into the background.
In 2018 it was already common knowledge that gait analysis was more accurate than facial recognition at the time. This would have been defeatable then.
I think dazzle camouflage is best understood as having limited scope of application as pertains to face recognition. It shouldn't be regarded as failing within its intended scope on account of gait analysis. Everyone knows you have to learn the juggalo dance moves to go along with the face paint.
The only way to meaningfully defeat surveillance technology is to make a constitutional amendment that limits its use privately and publicly. We keep fighting it technologically which is an arms race. A cultural solution is the only path forward that will see meaningful success.
It would be interesting to first create a taxonomy of juggalo face paint patterns a la aruco markers/April tags, then see if a sufficiently large crowd of juggalos could be used to calibrate cameras
So maybe they may be smarter then they get credited for being. Probably not. But now anyone feeling uncomfortable about facial recognition tech now know what they can do to combat it if they chose. One question. Can you get thru the airport and onto a plan wearing the makeup?
In Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson one of the characters happens by a group of young women wearing devices that project constantly changing colored light patterns onto their faces to prevent facial recognition tracking. It's barely even mentioned in the book but I wondered how viable that was of an idea. The character's only thought on the devices IIRC was that most people only occasionally wore them.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] threadEdit found a link pretty fast.
So I will defend that line in the song. I will only accept answers from people who can explain why ferromagnetism works to me assuming I know how electromagnets create magnetic fields.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Eye
In the near future, humanity lives in a technologically advanced, dystopian society. The government requires that everyone receive an ocular implant that records everything they see. The implant provides an augmented-reality head-up display to the user with information about anyone and anything they may see, as well as recording the user's view. Investigations into crimes amount to detectives reviewing video and assessing whether an alleged perpetrator is innocent or guilty.
Sal Friedland, a detective with the metropolitan police force, crosses paths with a young woman who appears to trigger a glitch in his ocular implant, as no data about her is retrieved. When he reviews his own record of that day, he finds that every single frame of her has been mysteriously deleted. At work, Sal is handed several homicide cases where the victims' own visual records of their deaths are replaced with the killer's point of view, thus hiding the killer's identity. At another murder scene, Sal chases the apparent killer only to nearly be killed when they hack his implant and change what he sees in real time.
I refuse to get a "RealID" for nearly the same reasons.
I would have actually expected it to be more popular by now.
[0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle/
Con: It's the guantanamo bay weight reduction plan.