AI-Driven Facial Recognition Is Coming And Brings Big Ethics And Privacy Concerns

"Disguised face identification" technology could make staying anonymous in public a bigger challenge (and make it easier to digitally unmask dissenters). To evade the risk of being IDed by authorities, protesters, looters, and rioters may obscure their faces with hats, scarves, or sunglasses. But for better or worse, dissenting in disguise may no longer mean dissenting anonymously. New research introduces an artificial intelligence-powered framework for "disguised face identification" – abbreviated by the researchers as DIC. The work, which considered how to identify masked faces in a crowd, addresses two related concerns at once: Most facial recognition technologies not only lack disguised-detection abilities, they also struggle to separate individuals from their backgrounds.