Computer Vision News - June 2016

But when there is no guarantee that businesses or government’s surveillance programs are conducting themselves in an ethical way, then it’s up to you, consumer or citizen, to seek out the practices of businesses. In my research, I have found lots of companies doing computer vision, collecting information for facial recognition as input for building biometric databases, collecting emotions and often use that information for targeted advertisement together with other information like race, age, gender and what people are looking at. It is not only the exterior of a person, but also the interior which they are reading , so that they can carry out also emotional analysis, which can be fun in some cases and very invasive if it’s done remotely and passively in a way that is quite manipulative. CVN: Do we need to control our visibility because some computers are being malicious? Harvey: Computers are used maliciously when people act maliciously. But without knowing for certain how people are acting and whether there are people acting maliciously or not, I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to understand the repercussions and what kind of information can be collected. In other words, how could that malicious actor or algorithm violate your privacy. Thinking about these things, I started to work about six years ago on a project that would allow you to modulate your visibility to put yourself in control, whereas hiding from someone else’s technology puts you much more on the defensive. I think a good lesson from history is camouflage and I talked about it at my re: publica talk this week here in Berlin : at the beginning of the 20 th century, camouflage was thought of as something very defensive and cowardly. Theodore Roosevelt would call it effeminate. It was considered as a weakness and nobody wanted to be seen as weak or defensive. So I think there is a parallel between the perception of camouflage at the beginning of the 20th century and the perception of privacy at the beginning of the 21th century. After camouflage was used with success on the battlefield during the Second World War, it actually became a symbol of human intellect. “ Computers are used maliciously when people act maliciously ” Computer Vision News Guest 9 CV Dazzle is a type of camouflage from computer vision. It uses hairstyle, makeup and accessories to alter the dark and light areas of a face to break apart the expected features targeted by Viola-Jones and other computer vision face detection algorithms. [CV Dazzle Look 4. 2010. Hair by Pia Vivas . Photo ©Adam Harvey]