Face masks often aren't enough to defeat facial recognition, study finds

Well, there goes the tiniest privacy silver lining on that otherwise dark coronavirus cloud.

A new study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that many commercially available facial-recognition systems are still able to correctly identify people wearing face masks. As mask use becomes ever more commonplace due to the pandemic, there continues to be much law enforcement hand-wringing about possible negative effects on the pervasive surveillance technology. The NIST study suggests that police can rest easy.

The study, published Monday, evaluated the performance of 89 facial-recognition algorithms. Notably, these were all algorithms developed pre-pandemic. In other words, none of them were developed for a world where masked individuals are the norm. Even so, according to NIST, some of the algorithms performed remarkably well at identifying people with masks on. Read more...

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