London artists use faces to resist facial recognition

(11 Mar 2020) LEAD IN:
To resist the rise of facial recognition camera technology, a group of London artists are using their faces to fight back.
STORYLINE:
As night falls on the British capital, Georgina Rowlands and Anna Hart, are applying makeup.
But instead of lipstick and eyeliner, they're covering their faces with seemingly random geometric shapes.
Rowlands has long narrow triangles and thin white rectangles crisscrossing 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, founded 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."
They're also concerned about lack of legislation to regulate, its inaccuracy and how it affects public spaces.
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.
Facial recognition technology works by turning an image of a face into a mathematical formula that can be analyzed by algorithms.
CV Dazzle - CV is short for "computer vision" - uses cubist-inspired designs to thwart the computer, explains Rowlands.
To test that their designs work, they use their smartphone cameras, which have simple face detection feature that puts squares around any faces in an image.
"I can see that I'm hidden, it's not detecting me, so the shapes have worked," says Rowlands says after Hart finishes applying her design.
Other artists have come up with countermeasures like sunglasses that reflect infrared light to blind cameras.
Rowlands, Hart and two other artists founded the Dazzle Club last August, following news that London's King's Cross redevelopment district had quietly experimented with live facial recognition cameras without public knowledge or consent, sparking a backlash.
"Now your face can be used to access your entire records of your entire identity and history, I think that we need to understand what this technology is," says Rowlands.
"It's deeply ironic, you make yourself very visible to be invisible. So, we talk about hiding in plain sight," says Hart.
Britain has long been used to surveillance cameras in public spaces to counter security threats.
London is ranked as having one of the world's highest concentrations of closed-circuit television cameras.
But that acceptance is being tested as authorities and corporations increasingly seek to deploy a new generation of cameras with facial recognition technology while activists, lawmakers and independent experts raise concerns about mass surveillance, privacy, and accuracy.
Underscoring those fears, 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.
Public attitudes to facial recognition technology in Britain appear to be mixed, according to one survey last year, which found most people said they don't know enough about it but nearly half said they should be able to opt out.  

Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter:   / ap_archive  
Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​
Instagram:   / apnews  


You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...