Facial recognition technology a growing concern
AS NIGHT falls in London, Georgina Rowlands and Anna Hart start applying make-up. Instead of lipstick and eye liner, they’re covering their faces with geometric shapes.
Rowlands has long narrow blue triangles and thin white rectangles criss-crossing her face.
Hart has a collection of red, orange and white angular shapes on hers.
They’re two of the four founders of the Dazzle Club, a group of artists set up last year to provoke discussion about the growing using of facial recognition technology.
The group holds monthly silent walks through different parts of London to raise awareness about the technology, which they say is being used for “rampant surveillance”. Other concerns include its lack of regulation, inaccuracy and how it affects public spaces.
Some 19 people attended the most recent event in the East London neighbourhood of Shoreditch, and anyone can take part in the walks, in which participants have to paint their faces in a style called CV Dazzle.
The technique, developed by artist and researcher Adam Harvey, is aimed at camouflaging against facial detection systems, which turn images of faces into mathematical formulas that can be analysed by algorithms.
CV Dazzle – where CV is short for computer vision – uses cubist-inspired designs to thwart the computer, said Rowlands. “You’re trying to kind of scramble that by applying these kind of random colours and patterns. The most important is having light and dark colours. So we often go for blacks and whites, very contrasting colours, because you’re trying to mess with the shadows and highlights of your face.”
A similar technique was used extensively in World War I to camouflage British naval ships and confuse opponents about the actual heading or location of the ships.
To test that their designs work, they use the simple face detection feature on their smartphone cameras.
“I can see that I’m hidden, it’s not detecting me,” Rowlands added. Britain has long been used to surveillance cameras in public spaces to counter security threats, and London is ranked as having one of the world’s highest concentrations of closed-circuit television cameras. Opposition to algorithmic surveillance is not limited to Britain. Russia activists were reportedly arrested last month for holding a similar face paint protest over Moscow’s facial recognition cameras.
“There’s a movement of resistance against facial recognition that we’re actively participating in and we want to kind of further initiate.”
London police recently started using live facial recognition cameras on operational deployments. Last week officers arrested a woman wanted for assault after the cameras picked her out of a street crowd on a busy shopping street. Police say new technology is needed to keep the public safe and images of innocent people are deleted immediately.