Insecurity demonstration: facial reconition

This is tiny guide for demonstrating to people the danger facial recognition poses to them.

Motivation

People often underestimate the impact of tech on their lives because they don’t know what it means in practice. This is a tiny experiment that can be done with people in 5 minutes that shows them what are the implications.

This is highly inspired by the following video:

Demo 1: Find the people’s names just from their faces

What I’m doing here is for educational purposes only and should not be used in practice against anyone without their consent.

1. Find a picture of someone

In this case I grabbed of a face from someone on youtube.

In specific, this person:

guy2

2. Drop it into Yandex Images

Yandex Images is like google images. It allows you do to a reverse image search but as opposed to google, they deploy there facial recognition. So, if you give them a picture of a face, they’ll find similar faces (or even the same)

Then with that picture on yandex you can find the website where it as posted (probably the social media account of that someone).

In this case it’s almost for sure not the same person (part of the reason why I posted this one in particular), but the similarities are striking and it should people at least the negative potential of this

Ethical Considerations

After doing this little demo, it’s important to emphasize that this should not be done for any other reason than demonstration purposes

Demo 2: run facial recognition software on computer (WIP)

inspiration: https://twitter.com/grssnbchr/status/1225846790093725696