This is an article published by The Guardian on October 29, 2023.
The UK policing minister encourages police department throughout the country to drastically increase the use of facial recognition software, and include passport photos into the AI database of recognisable images.
Excerpts:
“Policing minister Chris Philp has written to force leaders suggesting the target of exceeding 200,000 searches of still images against the police national database by May using facial recognition technology.”
“He also is encouraging police to operate live facial recognition (LFR) cameras more widely, before a global artificial intelligence (AI) safety summit next week at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.”
“Philp has also previously said he is going to make UK passport photos searchable by police. He plans to integrate data from the police national database (PND), the passport office and other national databases to help police find a match with the “click of one button”.”
If the widespread adoption of facial recognition softwares (that can recognise and identify a face even when it is partially covered) concerns you, you may want to consider using FAWKES, an image cloaking software developed at the Sand Lab at the university of Chicago.
The latest version (2022) includes compatibility with Mac 1 chips.
http://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes
This is what the Sand lab website says:
“The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes1, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how unknown third parties can track them by building facial recognition models out of their publicly available photos. At a high level, Fawkes “poisons” models that try to learn what you look like, by putting hidden changes into your photos, and using them as Trojan horses to deliver that poison to any facial recognition models of you. Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these “cloaked” photos as you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends, printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would any other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, “cloaked” images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable by humans or machines and will not cause errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you by presenting an unaltered, “uncloaked” image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public) to the model, the model will fail to recognize you.“
I downloaded FAWKES on my M1 MacBook, and while a bit sloe, it works perfectly. You may have to tweak your privacy and security settings (in System Settings) to allow FAWKES to run on your computer. I also recommend to use the following method to open the app the first time you use it: go to Finder > Applications > FAKWES. Right click on the app name and select “Open”.
Be a bit patient, it took a 2-3 minutes for the software to open when I first used it. And it may take a few minutes to process photos. But all in all, it is working very well. Please note that it only seems to work for M1 chip MacBook but not iMac.