Resist facial recognition with this low-tech (but creepy!) solution

More and more companies are using facial recognition, fingerprints, retina scans and other forms of biometric identification to know who we are.

Artist and agitator Sam Lavigne is not cool with this and wanted to do something about it, publishing in The New Inquiry this week a decidedly low-tech solution: print out masks of other people’s faces to wear over your face. But they’re not just any people, Lavigne has picked 130 executives from biometrics companies, whose faces are all available for download.

“It’s time we conspire to shield our meatsacks from such intrusions and reclaim what encryption means in the context of biometric technology. You can, in fact, encrypt your face, and your bodies,” Lavigne explains in his piece. “Since they’ve chosen to profit by face-snatching the rest of us, we figured that we would resist by doing the same in reverse. The difference is that by not matching their names to their faces, we’ve chosen to grant these executives the very thing their industry denies to us: anonymity.”

We transformed the faces of high level executives at biometric companies into masks you can print out and wear. https://t.co/NDkkHDyOKf

— Sam Lavigne (@sam_lavigne) June 22, 2017

We applaud Lavigne’s ingenuity. If you’re interested in this, it isn’t the first time we’ve written about his work.