How Londoners trick facial recognition tech

Coda Story

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How Londoners trick facial recognition tech
A group of Londoners defy security cameras by walking through the city in surreal face paint

It’s a rainy night in Deptford, a fast-gentrifying area of south-east London. Sheltering from the drizzle in the lobby of a theatre, I find a group of young people daubing blue, black and red paint on their faces in strange, geometric shapes. 

“Get some paint on, and we’ll be ready leave at 7,” someone says, handing me a mirror, a brush and a sticky black cake of paint. 

This is London’s Dazzle Club. They meet once a month to walk through the city for an hour, wearing face paint to defy dozens of public and private security cameras.

Founder Emily Roderick, 24, paints an attendee’s face with blue and black oblongs. “I’m painting his face in a way that would stop facial recognition algorithms from recognizing there’s a face there,” she tells me. “Your face is very symmetrical; it has specific areas of light and dark — and I’m trying to use the paint to reverse that.”

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Our third walk took place on 17th September and was led by @georginarowl . We were led around the Canary Wharf Estate beginning at The Traffic Light Tree and ending at Robin Hood Gardens. “Within this space, our group of participants walk through the site wearing anti-facial recognition face paint. Our entrance triggers a flurry of radio calls, high alert. Suspicious activity. A group of people walking around the highly controlled land wearing unconventional makeup, walking in patterns across the public space. ​no filming, no photography, no protesting, no littering, no organised gatherings. After getting stopped various times on our venture, and facing the fast oncoming traffic of the large Blackwall roundabout, the group stops at Robin Hood Gardens. One block remains. Warm orange light seeps out of the flats, sounds of residents cooking, clanking pans reverberates against the high walls surrounding the redevelopment, ‘​Blackwall Reach​’. The surroundings of the long block are a sprawling construction site. Cranes reach into the sky emblazoned with advertising billboards, ‘​Step inside an ambitious £500 million transformation of one of London’s most exciting areas’. ​We stood quietly with the residents waiting to be evicted, for the coming ‘third phase’ of the development. The demolition signifies the death of generosity. ​what we were trying to do was too good for the people that were going to live in it.” -Georgina Rowlands, 2019 #cvdazzle #surveillance #facialrecognition #thedazzleclub

A post shared by The Dazzle Club (@thedazzleclub) on

 

London is the second-most monitored city in the world after Beijing, with more than 600,000 surveillance cameras in operation, and the average Londoner filmed around 300 times a day. 

In 2016, London’s Metropolitan police began trialing facial recognition technology to monitor and apprehend people outside Tube stations, at the annual Notting Hill Carnival and a Remembrance Sunday parade in commemoration of World War I. 

According to a review of the Carnival trial by privacy campaigners Big Brother Watch, the technology wrongly flagged innocent people 98% of the time. 

“No other European country has a face surveillance epidemic like the UK, aligning us with the likes of China rather than our democratic counterparts,” said Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch.  

“There is an element of tricking the AI,” says Roderick. The group is using the ‘CV dazzle’ method, created by the Brooklyn artist Adam Harvey. The technique dupes facial recognition cameras by blotting out the nose, deforming the eyebrows and warping the eyeline. 

Roderick adds a blue dot to her subject’s face. “These systems are still quite stupid. It’s mad that you can just paint your face in this way and suddenly the technology can’t function anymore,” she says. 

I wasn’t planning to join in, but suddenly I’m swishing paint onto my own face in what I’d call an “expressionist” style, going for black, orange and red in garish combination. The result is clownish; not exactly the ethereal look the rest of the group have managed to achieve.

As we swipe paint across our features, we test the results using our smartphones. We use face detection filters, like Snapchat’s, to see if the camera can still recognize us as a human. It’s a satisfying moment when it can’t.

Roderick, alongside her co-founder Georgina Rowlands, 23, began practicing this method three years ago while they were art students at London’s Central St Martins school of Art. “We just sat in the studio just trying to paint our faces and make it function,” she said. “It was quite fun just looking at Snapchat and trying to get it to stop working.” 

Roderick and Rowlands founded the Dazzle Club so that other people could learn, too. The designs are simple, clean, and decisively strange. “I look like a tube map!” says one of the attendees excitedly as he examines himself. 

 

“We’re trying to find a way to do it that’s not so intimidating and garish — I wouldn’t want to go to work like this,” Roderick says. 

Roderick and Rowlands are now so experienced at this that they can sometimes trick the cameras simply with a few dots and a swipe of paint.  

In September, it emerged that Kings Cross Central development, a privately-owned company, had been employing facial recognition technology near King’s Cross station. After public outcry followed the revelations, the development company released a statement saying the technology was being used to aid the police to “prevent and detect crime in the neighborhood and ultimately to help ensure public safety.”

“Tens of millions of people will now have been scanned by facial recognition cameras in this country, yet very few of us even know about it,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch. 

It’s a thought preoccupying me as we gather outside the theatre, wearing our new, anonymous face paint. We walk in silence through the dark London streets, past council estates and new developments, train stations and docks, all watched over by cameras.

We’re an eerie sight, walking in a long line. One local follows us for a while. “What’s going on?” he asks, falling in line with the procession. 

Cameras peer at us, but there’s a feeling of defiance — almost mischief — knowing we have perhaps evaded detection.  – Rappler.com

Isobel Cockerell is a reporter and filmmaker with Coda Story. A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, she has also reported for WIRED, USA Today, Rappler, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post and others.

This article has been republished from Coda Story with permission.

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