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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Governments are the first in the line to abuse facial recognition.

Now as CCTV cams are everywhere, everybody should have a right to wear a mask everywhere without getting discriminated.

> everybody should have a right to wear a mask everywhere without getting discriminated.

It's a losing game. They will track you with your mask on from the moment you leave your house, your phone, your credit card, your gait, your car... It's like a super cookie, if you don't delete all the 10 places it was stored, a single missed one will be enough to regenerate it.

Total citizen surveillance is coming, everyone's location history will be in a database and kept for years, just like phone call metadata.

Nevertheless, when somebody has stolen my bike from a bike parking (where there were no other bikes and no crowd) right under a security camera near a fancy shopping centre the police couldn't find it, miraculously they couldn't even find it on the camera record like if both the bike and the thief were invisible.

most shops and private facilities have motion activated video to reduce storage volumes. There is a massive variance in how good they are at actually turning on and recording given some movement.

perhaps some city-owned CCTV cams are always on, but I'd be doubtful.

>Total citizen surveillance is coming, everyone's location history will be in a database and kept for years, just like phone call metadata.

I am under the assumption that it's already here since whoever carries a mobile phone is already under surveillance since the mobile networks share info with the government, the license plate readers see who is traveling on the roads, and electronic financial records show your transactions.

I use cash, public transport (which is awesome in Europe), almost always have my cellphone switched to airplane mode (going online via WiFi occasionally e.g. to check for new messages) and only turn its GPS on about 5 times a year for rather short durations of time and am pretty happy.

You are 0.0001% representative of the population. You will be tracked by metadata absence. There are a couple articles about terrorists/spies tracked through data patterns generated when the closed their usual phone and switched to a burner one.

Even if you pay cash, your transactions can still be tracked, because your face will be on the cash register camera.

Public transport has cameras inside too.

It's just a matter of time until the computing power and software to analyze all this video will be everywhere.

Agreed. Acting unusually and furtively is a great way to raise red flags and invite more tracking. By repeatedly working to fly under the radar, you've made yourself much more interesting and more likely to be tracked closely whenever/wherever you reappear.

You want to be overlooked? Behave typically, obviously, and boringly.

So there aren't any cameras on public transport, or at the stations? Or on any of the buildings you walk past? Or at any of the stores you enter, or on light/power poles on public streets?

I haven't kept up with EU currency security features, but I remember reading how they keep trying to put RFID chips/fibers in them for tracking. They're currently using magnetic ink[1] that can be read via scanners as you walk past. There might be other tracking features that aren't disclosed.

> Some areas of the euro notes feature magnetic ink. For example, the rightmost church window on the €20 note is magnetic, as well as the large zero above it.

I don't think you're as anonymous as you think, even with all of the steps you've taken.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_banknotes#Security_featur...

FYI, Google tracks you even on airplane mode. So the second you jump back on Wifi your location history is updated. With dead reckoning calculations using your accelerometer and other sensors they know EXACTLY where you've been.

Not sure if they do this on iPhone or just android, but my guess is they do both if you've installed google maps/gmail etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0G6mUyIgyg

Masks are a boring, defensive option. We need t-shirts with patterns that identify as multiple wanted criminals and lots of people wearing them at the same time.

Surely that would be easily filtered out via ML?

This would depend on the nature of the movement. In a more realistic way: You should probably develop a simple way to create adverse images from local photographs, and a simple, decently reliable way to put those on t-shirts, hoodies, jackets. Creating imaging adverse to machine recognition is a field of active research, after all.

This would allow local privacy groups to put people from their group on their shirts and distribute them, kind of like facial recognition graffiti. This would be much harder to deal with due to the volume and flux of adverse imaging.

And more and more passing laws the expressly prevent you from concealment of your identity in a crowd.

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