Adam Harvey

A seriously good idea which I can find no prior art for! Also, worth checking out this pro-privacy/anti-surveillance artist/activist - Adam Harvey. His site and his work is a fantastic intro into the anti-surveillance scene. (Check out his DataPools). https://adam.harvey.studio/

I agree in a world of data surveillance, techniques that obfuscate, like you have mentioned are ideal. The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security. Therefore I imagine it will be met with resistance, if any useful tools become widespread in use. For example, faking traffic jam data for google maps with phones. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-04/man-creates-fake-traffic-jam-on… Faking wifi and location data to unlock airpods pro in India. https://www.reddit.com/r/AirpodsPro/comments/1gqscig/two_guys_in_india… DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley’s elite pools. https://adam.harvey.studio/datapools/ These are just a couple of fun examples, obviously you could augment these with LLM/DL tools and other anti-censorship (mixer, DCnets etc ), bot(nets) tools to create multiple identities that post in other languages, create fake photos of your in various countries, to make it hard to follow.

The paint scheme reminds me of "CV Dazzle", makeup designs to obscure a face from machine recognition, at the cost of only being accepted in goth bars: https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle/

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. [0] https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle/

https://adam.harvey.studio/skylift/ https://github.com/adamhrv/skylift

Totally forgot this gem [0]. Done hide. Overwhelm. [0] https://adam.harvey.studio/hyperface/

>DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley’s elite pools. https://adam.harvey.studio/datapools/ That is hilarious and should be expanded.

CV Dazzle (2010) attempted this to counter the facial recognition methods in use at that time. https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle

> Juggalo makeup is supposedly extremely effective. Yeah, it's supposed to be better than black metal makeup and even better than that early-2010's anti-detection makeup: https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recognition/ https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle Although that was around 2018-2019 so, given how quickly face recognition is evolving, I wonder if juggalo makeup works anymore. Besides, as mentioned by many of the interviewees in OP's article, there's a balance between changing or hiding your facial features and looking "suspicious" or "unnatural" which is of course context dependent. Concerts are safer to "cheat" than airports.

Check out Adam Harvey's "CV Dazzle" and other related design efforts. CV Dazzle is from 2010 but still very cool, the concept is generally to design cyberpunk clothing and headware that is adversarial to face detection algorithms. Algorithms are always changing, but I'm sure there will always be attacks of this nature. We could see them pop up in military applications in addition to personal privacy. https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle https://yr.media/tech/guide-to-anti-surveillance-fashion/

isn't this very similar to the, quite venerable, https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle/ ?

See also https://adam.harvey.studio/cvdazzle

Or using all those Opt Out pictures as part of new training data (they will never admit to it and hide behind vague “proprietary training sets” as origins) spinning off a “new company” using the improved facial recognition and no one is opted out of New Company™ > Training datasets are highly guarded secrets in the face recognition industry. Companies are reluctant to disclose their data sources out of fear it could cause legal issues. For example, in 2021 an NBC investigation11 revealed that Everalbum, Inc. (now Paravision AI) was charged by the Federal Trade Commission for using millions of users’ faces without consent to build face recognition technologies. The FTC forced Everalbum to delete all biometric data and any face recognition model trained using it.12 Coincidentally, Everalbum’s AI group was listed as a user of the MegaFace dataset of non-consensual Flickr images. Ever AI (now Paravision) also participated in the NIST Visa-Border that uses 1.6M apparently non-consensual face images from border crossings in U.S. It seems that no matter where your selfies are appearing these days, companies and government agencies are eager to use it as biometric data. https://adam.harvey.studio/todays-selfie/