Hello /tech/,
I will be getting a passport soon to leave the country. I want some advice on how to best obfuscate my face to defeat the facial recognition involved in the biometric photograph I need to take for my passport. What can I safely implement to do so that won't cause me grief now or in the future? I want my passport photograph to be accepted, but I don't want to then get detained in another country on suspicion of having a fraudulent passport as a result of my obfuscation measures.
The following is what I have already considered and may implement:
1. Be clean shaven. Since I cannot grow enough facial hair to cover my jaw line, I will not benefit from having any in my passport. I can begin growing my facial hair once I leave the country, but before then it is better to not provide the AI with any data on my facial hair, which alone can be used to uniquely identify me on the basis of growth pattern and hair phenotype.
2. Wax my eyebrows. Since facial recognition relies heavily on data from the brow, waxing my eyebrows to a length and width slightly different from my natural look can obfuscate this, hopefully without giving me any trouble in the future.
3. Change my hairstyle. Having a hairstyle that obfuscates its length and phenotype, such as by slicking it down with gel or ironing or curling it, can minimize the amount of reliable data on my hair that can be extracted from my photograph. This should not pose any major problem for me in the future as long as it is not obvious.
These I have considered, but rejected as too risky:
4. Wear colored eye contacts. While this can be effective, it is an obvious change that will be very difficult to believably explain in the event that anyone objects to it. Anyone closely inspecting my passport photograph will be able to determine that my eye color is different and may question me on those grounds. How am I to convince border agents in some backwater African or Asian country that those are just colored contacts that I no longer use, and not that the passport is fake, when they may not even know that colored contacts exist? Why would they believe me even if they did?
5. Remove my eyebrows. This is also too obvious a change and will also look ridiculous on my passport photo. There is little more to gain from this than can be accomplish with waxing.
6. Add/remove birth marks. This will be unlikely to help with facial recognition software and will likely just increases the chances of me being interrogated and detained at borders. Like the colored contacts, this is more useful for scenarios that don't involve a mandatory biometric facial photograph.
7. Apply makeup. This can be done to subtly change the tone and shadowing of my face to confuse the AI and cause larger error margins, but it may either be totally ineffective due to the facial recognition algorithm being used (as has happened to CV Dazzle[2]) or effective enough to cause me problems later on.
And finally, this is one I am considering but unsure about how risky it is, which is the main inspiration for this thread:
8. Use cloaking software like Fawkes[1] to subtlely distort my face in photographs to utterly defeat facial recognition while still being easily recognizable to humans. While this is very effective, it is so effective in fact that any attempt at verifying my identity by comparing my face to my passport photo will likely fail because the AI will classify them as two different people. This may not be a problem so long as I am not required to undergo facial biometric verification, such as by opting out of them where possible and avoiding countries that have no opt-out option, but that may just set me up to get completely fucked in the future in the event my only path is through a face scan.
Unlike the eyebrow waxing and other changes I mentioned above, which will likely lower the confidence of the match or even confuse it while not defeating facial recognition altogether, the morphing that will be applied to my face will be in areas considered permanent and stable without major plastic surgery (like the nose bridge, mouth corners, and jawline). It is reasonable for a person's hair style, facial hair, and even eyebrows to change over time… not so much with eye color, nose bridge, and jawline.
What do you think? Do you think any of the ideas above might work? Or do you think they are all too risky to try and that I should just bite the bullet by letting the government have an accurate copy of my face? What about morphing using Fawkes? Is that too risky?
If you have any other ideas or recommendations, I'd love to hear them.
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[1] -
https://cvdazzle.com/[2] -
https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/