After decades of study, automatic face detection and recognition systems are now accurate and widespread. Naturally, this means users who wish to avoid automatic recognition are becoming less able to do so. Where do we stand in this cat-and-mouse race? We currently live in a society where everyone carries a camera in their pocket. Many people willfully upload most or all of the pictures they take to social networks which invest heavily in automatic face recognition systems. In this setting, is it still possible for privacy-conscientious users to avoid automatic face detection and recognition? If so, how? Must evasion techniques be obvious to be effective, or are there still simple measures that users can use to protect themselves? In this work, we find ways to evade face detection on Facebook, a representative example of a popular social network that uses automatic face detection to enhance their service. We challenge widely-held beliefs about evading face detection: do our old techniques such as blurring the face region or wearing "privacy glasses" still work? We show that in general, state-of-the-art detectors can often find faces even if the subject wears occluding clothing or even if the uploader damages the photo to prevent faces from being detected.
This study investigated the independent and combined effects of attractiveness and distinctiveness on face recognition. In a preliminary study, subjects rated the distinctiveness of 90 standardized facial photographs. These ratings and previously obtained ratings of attractiveness were used to select 12 target faces for a standard face recognition task. The results confirmed that more distinctive faces are remembered better. Attractiveness was a poor predictor of recognition, however, especially when variation in distinctiveness was controlled. These results indicate that a new perspective on the role of attractiveness in face recognition is needed, and they also support arguments that facial distinctiveness is a fundamental variable in recognition performance. In this study we examine the relationship between objective aspects of facial appearance and facial “distinctiveness”. Specifically, we examine whether the extent to which a face deviates from “average” correlates with rated distinctiveness and measures of memorability. We find that, provided the faces are rated with hair concealed, reasonable correlations can be achieved between their physical deviation and their rated distinctiveness. More modest correlations are obtained between physical deviation and the extent to which faces are remembered, either correctly or falsely, after previous study. Furthermore, memory ratings obtained to “target” faces when they have been previously seen (i.e. “hits”) do not show the expected negative correlation with the scores obtained to the same faces when acting as distractors (i.e. “false positives”), though each correlates with rated distinctiveness. This confirms the theory of Vokey and Read (1992) that the typicality distinctiveness dimension can be broken down into...