Invisibility Cloak

March 13, 2020 1:20 PM

I can opt out of accepting cookies, and disable location settings on my phone, but a face-recognition system doesn’t give me any way to opt out, short of defacing myself.
posted by BekahVee (17 comments total)

Wonderful irony that this article is unreadable if you dare to use incognito mode. Turns out you can't meaningfully opt out of cookie tracking by news orgs who claim to care about privacy after all.
posted by tocts at 1:54 PM on March 13, 2020 [20 favorites]

"If the computers find out that we can shapeshift, they're going to tell the church!!"
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 2:25 PM on March 13, 2020 [19 favorites]

Tom Goldstein, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, took an “invisibility cloak” from a pile on a chair in his office and pulled it on over his head. To my eye, it looked like a baggy sweatshirt made of glossy polyester, printed with garish colors in formless shapes that, far from turning Goldstein invisible, made him impossible to miss.

Emphasis mine -- I wonder if coordinated dazzle-wear could turn groups of people into modern zebras.

I could have worn a surgical mask on my trip, ostensibly for health reasons; reports of an unexplained pneumonia outbreak in China were making the news, and I’d spotted a woman on the C train in an N95 respirator mask, which had a black, satiny finish. Later, when I spoke to Arun Ross, a computer-vision researcher at Michigan State University, he told me that a surgical mask alone might not block enough of my face’s pixels in a digital shot to prevent a face-recognition system from making a match; some algorithms can reconstruct the occluded parts of people’s faces. As the coronavirus spread through China, SenseTime, a Chinese A.I. company, claimed to have developed an algorithm that not only can match a surgically masked face with the wearer’s un-occluded face but can also use thermal imaging to detect an elevated temperature and discern whether that person is wearing a mask.

And beyond that, as reported by Kaspersky in 2017, "you no longer can fool omnipresent surveillance systems by using masks, glasses, or special makeup; modern systems do not rely on facial recognition alone, also analyzing the way you walk (New Scientist, 2012) as well as your behavior and even your mood."

More from Police One, 2017:

Richard Myers, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, believes that the role of AI with any public safety camera systems – whether body worn or other – will surely evolve as the algorithms get more robust and facial recognition becomes more reliable.

“Technology already exists in the private sector security where AI helps stores identify behavior patterns that predict an imminent theft from a store shelf via CCTV,” Myers said. “Logically, some of that behavior pattern analysis AI will eventually be integrated into public safety video systems. It is probably more likely that this will first appear in ‘fixed’ CCTV systems, as the dynamic stream of video from body-worn systems will require even more AI rapid analysis.”

Theft prevention is one aspect of this AI-driven video analysis, but other predictive behavior analysis is interesting, and scary. How white engineers built racist code – and why it's dangerous for black people -- As facial recognition tools play a bigger role in fighting crime, inbuilt racial biases raise troubling questions about the systems that create them (The Guardian, 2017)

Facial recognition may be the crux of that article, but this same issue would be present in any computerized system -- people develop the software from their own biases, which will bias how the software is determined to work properly.

It goes beyond dressing without pattern. Walk without rhythm and we won't attract the worm surveillance system.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:56 PM on March 13, 2020 [10 favorites]

Is there anything fashion can do?

Is there anything it can't do?? *snap* *snap* *snap*
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:00 PM on March 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

(Clearview’s entire client list was stolen by hackers last month.)

Wow, lede buried halfway into the article!

(CNN article from two weeks ago)
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:13 PM on March 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

If I wish to keep myself incognito, here's my prime source.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:40 PM on March 13, 2020 [5 favorites]

Pagan Breakfast God Mask

Pagan Breakfast God Mask

PAGAN BREAKFAST GOD MASK
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:12 PM on March 13, 2020 [10 favorites]

Looks like a Pagan Breakfast God... fits most adults
-from the handy description, in case the name of the item wasn’t clear.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:39 PM on March 13, 2020

Oh sure, when Archie McPhee does it it's fun and kitschy, but I demand sacrificial offerings at a Waffle House just once and I'm put on some sort of list!

Scattered, smothered and capped for the hash god! Country ham for the ham throne!
posted by sysinfo at 6:25 PM on March 13, 2020 [8 favorites]

I'm still trying to figure out why the product says "14+" on the label. Like, are pre-teens too young to participate in breakfast-food worship? Is ritual violence to dairy and cured-meat products involved?
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:56 PM on March 13, 2020

Surprisingly, it's something that Pagan Breakfast worship adapted from modern Catholic confirmation. Once you reach the age of 14, the sacrament is conferred upon you through anointing with oil from the griddle's grease drawer. Only then are you ready to spread the word - in the name of Papa Joe, Bert, and the holy waffle, so mote it be.
posted by sysinfo at 9:24 PM on March 13, 2020 [5 favorites]

"In the name of the butter, the scone, and the holy yolk..."
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:34 PM on March 13, 2020 [7 favorites]

(all this isn't a derail, by the way; we all figured if we acted socially-inappropriate enough the system would choose to completely overlook us)
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:37 PM on March 13, 2020

I've flown under the radar for years by making AI uncomfortable with terrible jokes. Right now some TensorFlow algorithm is writing out "/^From:.*sysinfo@metafilter\.com/h:j".
posted by sysinfo at 9:48 PM on March 13, 2020

I wonder how good AI is at recognizing people wearing burqas.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:21 AM on March 14, 2020

Anti surveillance styling makeup/hair! Found previously on the blue.

I'd be curious to see if more recent facial recognition models are still fooled by these.
posted by rufb at 10:48 AM on March 14, 2020

This is a large plot point of Brian K Vaughan's comic Private Eye, which is legally available online for 'choose your own price' here.

It's set in a future after all data was accidentally made public and the internet breaks down. Quite fun as all the old people are millennials with full sleeve tattoos who talk about how great the internet was. Not sure how it holds up as it's ancient now. (2015)
posted by Telf at 12:10 PM on March 14, 2020 [1 favorite]