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Title    Weaponizing Our Faces
Date    Friday July 11 2014, @05:47PM
Author    janrinok
Topic   
from the my-paper-bag-will-also-work dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/07/11/0851232

Bringing to our attention a bizarre but interesting idea that increasingly pervasive facial recognition techniques can be defeated by wearing 'everybody's face', Venomous Coward writes:

In 2011, taken by the emergence of mass protest movements around the world, artist Zach Blas began making, "Facial Weaponization Suite, (2011 - present)."[Video]

Facial Weaponization Suite is a series of community workshops which discuss and resist biometric facial recognition technologies and the larger political ethos which supports and enforces them. The workshop participants then have their own faces scanned and compiled into a collective mask, a mask which resists any biometric quantification. Vice got Blas on the phone to learn a little more about the project.

The mask does appear to defeat the many algorithms that are currently employed by tracking cameras that are used in many countries. Of course, some countries have already brought in or at least proposed legislation to ban the wearing of any kind of mask in public (unless a masquerade party is being held) but, in the case of a mass demonstration, it might be enough to protect an individual from being recognised or having their movements tracked unless (s)he was physically detained. How long will it be before legislation is brought in to outlaw the manufacture or sale of such masks?

Links

  1. "Zach Blas" - http://www.zachblas.info/
  2. "Facial Weaponization Suite" - http://www.zachblas.info/projects/facial-weaponization-suite/
  3. "Vice" - http://www.vice.com/
  4. "learn a little more about the project" - http://www.vice.com/read/weaponizing-our-faces-an-interview-with-zach-blas-715

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printed from SoylentNews, Weaponizing Our Faces on 2023-07-04 23:10:19