JJ Luna's personal privacy blog. In 1959 he moved to Spain's Canary Islands to begin a then-illegal educational work that included secret meetings in remote mountain forests. Although pursued by General Franco's Secret Police, he maintained his privacy via a false identity and was never caught. When the Spanish dictator moderated Spain’s harsh laws in 1970, Luna was free to come in from the cold. However, he remains in the shadows to this day. He is currently an international privacy consultant.
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Friday, August 12, 2011

Does facial recognition technology really work?


The officials at London’s Metropolitan Police certain hope so. They are using sophisticated software to track down those suspected of being involved in the recent riots in the UK. An anonymous source says, “The issue is that you have to have a good picture of a suspect and it is only useful if you have something to match it against. In other words, the suspect already has to have a previous criminal record.”

In the United States, however, this is not necessarily the case. Someone has been spotted that looks like Casey Anthony and great efforts are being made to compare photos. (For details, see “Casey Anthony Photos in Facial Recognition Software” at
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=217173328334081&oid=108868112475151&comments)

The short answer to “Does facial recognition technology really work?” is “not always,” but it’s getting better. Does the target in a picture wear a baseball cap and sunglasses? If so, that may block the software, but much depends of the clarity of the picture.

In an extreme case, wear one of those face masks you see in Japan.

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Comments:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.51.html#subj5

It works well and is getting better every day. I've read news stories of police catching people who get driver's licenses under fake names by running that database against itself to find duplicates. Just in the last couple weeks I saw a story about a guy who had to go through a guilty-until-proven-innocent process to get his license back: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/17/man_sues_registry_after_license_mistakenly_revoked/?page=1

Since everybody has a license or a yearbook photo or friends tagging them on Facebook (which they can do whether or not you have an account), probably damn near everybody has a photo good enough for facial recognition software out there easily accessible to the government. And while usually that doesn't mean anything, in the last decade the government's been big on building big databases of everybody's activity, like with the warrantless wiretapping that went unpunished. This is something that can't be hidden from.
 
Simply stated, they measure distances from usually your eyes to another point on your face and see if the distances match up on a suspect's picture. A ball hat precludes a measurement up to the hairline and wrinkles on the forehead, glasses can obsecure the distance between the eyes, cheek gloss can obsecure cheek bone measurements, a breath rite strip will stop measurement of nose tips, and any facial hair plays havock, especially on the chin and below the nose. A smile in a picture will distort the biomeitricks....why do you think the DMV tells you not to smile in your driverslicense photo...or passport pictures; do it anyway. Dark eyeliner often prevents eye to eye or eye to ear (side view) measurements. That is because you can not really see where the eye starts. Yea...ski masks are great too.
 
Just wear a groucho marx type glasses and nose, that'll foil them!
 
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