New anti-surveillance clothing which has the ability to hide its wearer from security cameras has surfaced. The clothing uses ghostly coloured patterns of digitalised faces to trick facial recognition software. The patterns confuse facial recognition systems by overwhelming them with too many false ‘faces’ to read at once. The clothing was produced as part of the ‘Hyperface’ project, which prints patterns of eyes, noses and mouths onto clothing and textiles. Computer algorithms recognise these patterns as a face.
The software is bombarded with so many fake hits that it doesn’t know which face is the real one. The Hyperface project is the brainchild of Berlin artist and technologist Adam Harvey. And this is not the first anti-surveillance trend he has started. In a previous project, labelled ‘CV Dazzle’, the artist tried to invent a style that would also block facial recognition software.
He developed dazzling fluorescent makeup and hairstyling that hung in front of the face to disrupt surveillance software. ‘As I’ve looked at in an earlier project, you can change the way you appear, but, in camouflage you can think of the figure and the ground relationship,’ Mr Harvey said at the recent Chaos Communications Congress hacking conference in Hamburg.
There’s also an opportunity to modify the ‘ground’, the things that appear next to you, around you, and that can also modify the computer vision confidence score.’ And Hyperface aims to disrupt security software doing just that, Mr Harvey says, by: ‘Overloading an algorithm with what it wants, over-saturating an area with faces to divert the gaze of the computer vision algorithm.’ The eerie patterns that this creates can be worn directly or used to blanket an area from the watchful eye of ever-present security tech.
‘It can be used to modify the environment around you, whether it’s someone next to you, whether you’re wearing it, maybe around your head or in a new way,’ Mr Harvey said. During his talk, Mr Harvey presented the audience with a street scene from 1910, in which every passerby wore a hat that covered their face. ‘In 100 years from now, we’re going to have a similar transformation of fashion and the way that we appear. ‘What will that look like? Hopefully it will look like something that appears to optimise our personal privacy.’
Facial recognition technology can now tell more about us than ever before. Recent research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University claims to be able to predict criminality from subtle facial details such as the nose-mouth angle and lip curvature. ‘A lot of other researchers are looking at how to take that very small data and turn it into insights that can be used for marketing,’ Harvey said. ‘What all this reminds me of is Francis Galton and eugenics. ‘The real criminal, in these cases, are people who are perpetrating this idea, not the people who are being looked at.’ Mr Harvey and his design partner Hyphen-Labs intend to reveal more detail on the Hyperface project later this month.
