Cities like San Francisco have made a solid move to stamp out facial recognition systems in public places. While the same motion is being pushed in other parts of the world, the legislation isn’t moving quite as fast.
That does not mean you should resign to fate, though. In the meantime, you can still employ specific techniques to join the fight against facial recognition systems and prevent them from identifying you.
Next time you want to step out, here are some tips that could do wonders for you.
Tip #1 – Hair Styling
This tip will work best for women and men with long hair.
When facial recognition systems ‘look’ at you, they are trying to get mathematical details of your face such as:
- The distance between the forehead and chin
- The distance between the nose and lips
- The overall distance between the forehead and bridge of the nose, etc.
When you style your hair such that your face is partially covered, you can fool the systems into not registering your face as a face.
Tip #2 – Makeup
There are certainly people who have gone overboard with makeup to escape facial recognition, but we do not want that for you.
An excellent place to start from would be to conceal scars and visible marks on your face with makeup. Likewise, apply a concealer of a darker or lighter shade than your skin tone – depending on what spectrum your skin colour falls into.
You should also know that light interacts with the face differently. While it lights up the nose, eyebrows, and cheekbones, the eye sockets remain dull. Thus, reverse that by using makeup to lighten where it should be dark; and vice versa.
Tip #3 – Use Special Glasses
Most facial recognition systems leverage infrared technology to work. This means that you can stop them from working if you can distort these infrared rays. This is what most manufacturers of anti-facial recognition glasses have used in their products.
For some, the glasses have tiny LED lights that will be invisible to other humans but picked up by the cameras. Since the cameras won’t be able to identify a face behind the lights, they incorrectly assume that yours is not a face anyways.
Tip #4 – Choose Clothing Wisely
Celebs have been avoiding the media by donning a hoodie or cap. Best believe that you can use the same tactic for facial recognition cameras.
It is not every time the weather would allow you to wear a hooded sweatshirt. At such times, you can choose to don a scarf/ other appropriate headgear.
Likewise, you can fool some of these systems by wearing clothes that have realistic faces printed on them. That said, now might be the best time to get shirts with your favourite artiste/ sports figures/heroes’ faces.
Tip #5 – Modify Photos
While you are concerned about keeping your facial data safe and private offline, you should be pragmatic about the online models.
We already know that social media platforms like Facebook have a facial recognition algorithm. Likewise, we know that you can choose for the social media giant not to recognize you in photos.
The only problem with that is that they have to recognize you first before choosing not to.
Thus, you can choose not to upload photos to your feed anymore. If you would like to keep uploading pictures, you will benefit from manually adding some ‘noise’ to the images.
You can make such modifications with the aid of specific apps. Likewise, make sure you vary your application of the said noise so that it is not consistent enough to create an identifiable pattern.
Final Words
Our aim is to take back our privacy and data security before those in charge step in. With the tips above, you should be able to get out of the prying eyes of most of the facial recognition systems just waiting for you to leave the comfort of your homes.
