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Hiding in plain sight: activists don camouflage to beat Met surveillance | World news | The Guardian

Wearing makeup has long been seen as an act of defiance, from teenagers to New Romantics. Now that defiance has taken on a harder edge, as growing numbers of people use it to try to trick facial recognition systems.

Interest in so-called dazzle camouflage appears to have grown substantially since the Metropolitan police announced last week that officers will be using live facial recognition cameras on London’s streets – a move described by privacy campaigners and political activists as “dangerous”, “oppressive” and “a huge threat to human rights”.

Unlike fingerprinting and DNA testing, there are few restrictions on how police can use the new technology. And some of those who are concerned have decided to assert their right not to be put under surveillance with the perhaps unlikely weapon of makeup. Members of the Dazzle Club have been conducting silent walks through London while wearing asymmetric makeup in patterns intended to prevent their faces from being matched on any database.

“There was this extraordinary experience of hiding in plain sight,” said Anna Hart, of Air, a not-for-profit art group, who founded the club with fellow artists Georgina Rowlands and Emily Roderick.

“We made ourselves so visible in order to hide. The companies selling this tech talk about preventing crime. There is no evidence this prevents crime. It might be sometimes used when crime has been committed, but they push the idea that this will make us safer, that we will feel safer.”

Facial recognition works by mapping facial features – mainly the eyes, nose and chin – by identifying light and dark areas, then calculating the distance between them. That unique facial fingerprint is then matched with others on a database.

Makeup attempts to disrupt this by putting dark and light colours in unexpected places, either to confuse the technology into mapping the wrong parts of the face or concluding there is no face to map.

The concept was created by an artist, Adam Harvey, who coined the term “computer vision dazzle”, or “cv dazzle”, to mean a modern version of the camouflage used by the Royal Navy during the first world war.  …