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'Privacy Visor' Can Fool Face-Recognition Cameras
itwbennett writes: Dark shades aren't enough to go incognito in the age of face recognition camera systems. For that you need the Privacy Visor developed at Japan's National Institute of Informatics. The visor consists of a lightweight, wraparound, semitransparent plastic sheet fitted over eyewear frames. It works by reflecting overhead light into the camera lens, causing the area around the eyes to appear much brighter than normal.
These glasses seem kind of pointless in that from what the article says, they pretty much have to be that big in order to actually work - the earlier model by the same company was even bigger. With something like this, the goal should be to make them as surreptitious as possible so that the person wearing them doesn't stand out in a crowd and thus draw attention from whatever security organization is likely monitoring the cameras. $250 (at current exchange rates anyway) is also far too high of a price tag for a pair of what are basically glorified sunglasses.
Now, if they looked like normal sunglasses (or better yet could be built into prescription glasses) and were under $100, I could see myself getting a pair of these if I planned to be in an area with heavy CCTV usage.
Within the week, a new update will allow
a) recognition of people wearing the "Privacy Visor"
b) selling their name to people advertizing privacy products
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
... this will last only until the facial recognition algorithm is trained to ignore it. If it won't fool a human, it won't fool an algorithm for long. Better fixes are ones that exploit the weaknesses of the sensors rather than attacking the algorithm. The other example, cited right in TFA, uses a more effective long term strategy of hampering the sensors.
Upgrading the algorithm? Cheap, and only needs to be done once. Upgrading every sensor to filter IR? Not impossible, but much more expensive and thus likely to be skipped by businesses.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Given the weak, wimpy politically correct crowd, they'll be legal to wear in the near future.
All this so the cameras don't think you have a face. They still record you, and can tell you are a person by the way you move. And since you will be the only douchedork wearing these around, you should be easy to find.
I only have a small objection to simply having a fixed length history security camera record me for the off chance that a robbery happens during its two week storage window.
I have a huge objection to having a network of near-100% coverage cameras actually identifying me and logging my every movement while out in public. I don't care whether Madison Avenue or the NSA does it, I strongly object to both.
So yes, wearing giant bug-glasses, or a Jedi robe, or an IR LED tiara, or any other obvious means of concealing my face would stand out like a sore thumb to a human reviewing the footage; if it keeps the camera from automatically checking me in and out of some Big Brother sponsored version of FourSquare, however, I'd call that a drastic improvement vs an increasingly obvious future state of zero privacy.