Your phone’s facial recognition may finally work when you’re wearing a mask, just in time for the pandemic to end (and perhaps not so good for protesters).
Masks cause major problems with facial recognition
Researchers have discovered that facial recognition algorithms have gotten much better at working with just the top of the face, thanks to developers tweaking their algorithms. That’s great news for phone users, but bad news for privacy and even security in some parts of the world.
“Facial recognition data can be error-prone, implicating people in crimes they did not commit,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes. “Facial recognition software is particularly poor at recognizing African Americans and other racial minorities, women, and young people, often misidentifying or not identifying them, [and] disparately impacting certain groups.”
A study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) looked at 65 facial recognition algorithms issued after mid-March 2020 and compared their effectiveness by digitally masking faces and conducting before/after tests. To conduct the tests, NIST used photos of border crossings and photos of applicants for immigration benefits.
