Facial recognition

This Algorithm Might Make Facial Recognition Obsolete

In 2020, it’s worth assuming that every status update and selfie you upload online can eventually make its way into the hands of an obscure data-mining third party, into the hands of national authorities, or both.

On the flip side, being aware of exactly how shitty these companies are has prompted a lot of folks to come up with new, creative ways to slip out of this sort of surveillance. And while some of these methods—like, say, wearing masksor loading up on face paint could theoretically keep your photos from being pilfered, you’re also left with photos that don’t look much like you at all. But now, a team from the University of Chicago has come up with a much subtler tactic that still effectively fights back against these sorts of snooping algorithms.

Called “Fawkes”—an homage to the Guy Fawkes mask that’s become somewhat synonymous with the aptly named online collective Anonymous—the Chicago team initially started working on the system at the tail end of last year as a way to thwart companies like Clearview AI that compile their face-filled databases by scraping public posts.

Facial recognition

Facial recognition firms are scrambling to see around face masks

Some companies assert that their technology isn't affected by masks, and that artificial intelligence can still detect and identify people with a high accuracy rate, even when half the face is covered. 

A public beta program for Apple's latest iOS release showed that the tech giant is updating its Face ID to account for people wearing masks. Google didn't respond to a request for comment on whether it's doing the same with Android.

Experts on facial recognition are skeptical about claims that the technology isn't fazed by masks. After all, even without masks, facial recognition can stumble -- studies have found that the majority of facial recognition algorithms had a higher rate of false positives for people of color by a factor of "10 to 100 times."

And because of the pandemic, these algorithms can't be properly tested with face masks by the US' National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, which many consider the leading authority on facial recognition accuracy rates. 

Facial recognition

This ugly AF t-shirt blocks facial recognition technology

The average Londoner is caught on camera more than 300 times a day – that’s one CCTV camera for every 14 people, and that number’s predicted to rise to one in 11 in the next five years. Thankfully, researchers at Northeastern University, MIT, and IBM have designed a top that makes you invisible to facial recognition technology.

Normally, surveillance algorithms work by recognising a characteristic in an image, drawing a ‘bounding box’ around it, and assigning a label to that object. To interrupt this, the t-shirt uses colourful, pixelated patterns to confuse the technology into thinking you don’t exist. In other words, the clusters of pixels are placed to confuse the AI’s classification and labelling system, making it harder for it to map out your facial features.

“The adversarial t-shirt works on the neural networks used for object detection,” Xue Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, told Wired.

According to Lin, wearing the t-shirt makes you 63 per cent less likely to be detected by digital surveillance technology, but it’s not failsafe. “We still have difficulties in making it work in the real world because there’s that strong assumption that we know everything about the detection algorithm,” she said. “It’s not perfect, so there may be problems here or there.”

Facial recognition

How China built facial recognition for people wearing masks

Hanwang, the facial-recognition company that has placed 2 million of its cameras at entrance gates across the world, started preparing for the coronavirus in early January.

Huang Lei, the company’s chief technical officer, said that even before the new virus was widely known about, he had begun to get requests from hospitals at the centre of the outbreak in Hubei province to update its software to recognise nurses wearing masks.

“We wouldn’t wait until something explodes to act. If three or five clients ask for the same thing . . . we’ll see that as important,” said Mr Huang, adding that its cameras previously only recognised people in masks half the time, compared with 99.5 percent accuracy for a full face image.

Since then, demand has soared, from police stations, railway stations and all the office towers that use Hanwang’s cameras to screen employees, and Mr Huang reassigned teams of people to work on the challenge.

The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a person if the first attempt to identify them fails.

Facial recognition

China's facial recognition systems are evolving to recognise people with partially covered faces as coronavirus outbreak prompts huge increase in the number wearing masks

Chinese companies specialising in facial recognition have upgraded the technology to identify people wearing masks in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

Chinese company SenseTime, described as 'the most valuable AI startup in the world' and worth at least $4.5billion, is one of several firms improving its facial recognition to ensure a person cna be identified without them taking off their mask.

Instead of relying on having to see a person's mouth, the system is able to learn a person's identify from just their eyes and upper nose region of their face.  

People around the world are increasingly opting to wear medical masks and even respirators to prevent catching the potentially fatal COVID-19. 

Facial recognition

Automated facial recognition breaches GDPR, says EU digital chief

The EU’s digital and competition chief has said that automated facial recognition breaches GDPR, as the technology fails to meet the regulation’s requirement for consent.

Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice president for digital affairs, told reporters that “as it stands right now, GDPR would say ‘don’t use it’, because you cannot get consent,” EURACTIV revealed today.

GDPR classes information on a person’s facial features as biometric data, which is labeled as “sensitive personal data.” The use of such data is highly restricted, and typically requires consent from the subject — unless the processing meets a range of exceptional circumstances.

These exemptions include it being necessary for public security. This has led the UK’s data regulator to allow police to use facial recognition CCTV, as it met “the threshold of strict necessity for law enforcement purposes.”

Facial recognition

London police officially deploy facial recognition cameras

London police started using facial recognition cameras on Tuesday to automatically scan for wanted people, as authorities adopt the technology that has raised concerns about increased surveillance and erosion of privacy.

Surveillance cameras mounted on a blue police van monitored people coming out of a shopping center in Stratford, in east London. Signs warned that police were using the technology to find people “wanted for serious crimes.” Officers stood nearby, explaining to passers-by how the system works.

It’s the first time London’s Metropolitan Police Service has used live facial recognition cameras in an operational deployment since carrying out a series of trials that ended last year.

London police are using the technology despite warnings from rights groups, lawmakers and independent experts about a lack of accuracy and bias in the system and the erosion of privacy. Activists fear it’s just the start of expanded surveillance.

Facial recognition

Paper Masks Are Fooling Facial Recognition Software

Facial recognition is being widely embraced as a security tool — law enforcement and corporations alike are rolling it out to keep tabs on who's accessing airports, stores, and smartphones.

As it turns out, the technology is fallible. Researchers with the artificial-intelligence firm Kneron announced that they were able to fool some facial-recognition systems using a printed mask depicting a different person's face.

The researchers, who tested systems across three continents, said they fooled payment tablets run by the Chinese companies Alipay and WeChat, as well as a system at a border checkpoint in China. In Amsterdam, a printed mask fooled facial recognition at a passport-control gate at Schiphol Airport, they said.

The researchers said their findings suggested that a person who prints a lifelike mask resembling someone else could bypass security checkpoints to fly or shop on their behalf.

Facial recognition

Remember FindFace? The Russian Facial Recognition Company Just Turned On A Massive, Multimillion-Dollar Moscow Surveillance System

Built on several tens of thousands of cameras and what's claimed to be one of the most advanced facial recognition systems on the planet, Moscow has been quietly switching on a massive surveillance project this month.

The software that's helping monitor all those faces is FindFace, the product of NtechLab, a company that some reports claimed would bring "an end to anonymity" with its FindFace app. Launched in the mid-2010s, it allowed users to take a picture of someone and match their face to their to social media profiles on Russian site Vkontakte (VK).

Since then, NtechLab shut down the consumer app and pivoted to government surveillance, this week revealing it’s being paid at least $3.2 million for deploying its tools across the Russian capital. The initial news was broken in Russian media on Tuesday. 

Facial recognition

Government privacy watchdog under pressure to recommend facial recognition ban

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent agency, is coming under increasing pressure to recommend the federal government stop using facial recognition.

Forty groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sent a letter Monday to the agency calling for the suspension of facial recognition systems "pending further review."

“The rapid and unregulated deployment of facial recognition poses a direct threat to ‘the precious liberties that are vital to our way of life,'" the advocacy groups wrote.

The PCLOB "has a unique responsibility, set out in statute, to assess technologies and polices that impact the privacy of Americans after 9-11 and to make recommendations to the President and executive branch," they wrote.

The agency, created in 2004, advises the administration on privacy issues.