A friend of mine has to get their photo ID renewed. We are pretty sure this opens them to the risk of being automatically facially identified by the government and anyone who has access to the government database.
Is it worth them trying to grow out a long beard and hairstyle to partially cover their features for the photo ID or would it be better for them to try to be clean shaven and then walk around society with the beard and hair?
Leaving these links.
Can the accuracy bias by facial hairstyle be reduced through balancing the training data? They conclude facial hair does degrade accuracy of FR, but only to a degree.
Also, The Significance of Hair for Face Recognition
But FR gets more sophisicated all the time. I would expect, as years go on, the accuracy loss from facial hair changes will grow smaller. SmallER, but not zero.
This avenue isn’t so open to women or children tho, lol. Maybe the naqib users have the right idea. Just not for the reasons they originally thought. But that just begets France and others banning obscuration garments.
OTOH, in a state where they grab and detain people based solely on somewhat dodgy FR, do you want to increase risk of a false positive to a different identity?
That is a good point, and a risk my friend is currently willing to take, not that everyone needs to.
If they really want to track you then the camera has infra red capabilities and a beard won’t help.
They don’t think anyone is specifically trying to track them in particular; they’re just trying to avoid capitalist mass surveillance one step at a time :/
Another friend just got GrapheneOS which is amazing; for me personally, my phone is probably the easiest way my location is tracked since i don’t have a private OS yet.
Maybe the good question is does your friend want to have a beard or not?
They usually do have a beard, they’re just growing it bigger now temporarily for the photo.
I’m thinking that if the facial recognition model is trained on a bearded face, it would recognize a bearded face later. But on the other hand, submitting a clean shaven photo would give the models more data about your actual facial geometry which i don’t like either.