It won't save you - gait detection is also being used in places like China and that's a lot harder to protect yourself from.

Systems also tend to use regular and infrared images for detection too (at least in the case of ALPR).

We need people to care about these things and how the data is used, we need laws for rules around collection, access, and rights. We need to work together towards maintaining the ideas that support western democracy rather than moving towards nationalism.

I worry that instability from climate change and the refugee crisis that comes from that instability will make things worse, along with the current centralization of wealth/inequality issues and rise of more populist right wing movements.

Individual technical solutions will likely not do much to protect you if we lose the cultural framework around democracy.

> gait detection

All I can think of is The Ministry of Silly Walks.

The cyberpunk media was all wrong- people won't be wearing masks and punk hairstyles to hide their faces; they'll be walking silly and wearing baggy pants to hide their gaits.

"His walking pattern indicates that both legs are artificial below the knees. Similarly, the unconscious habit of stroking his prosthetic right arm is a clear symptom of Phantom Limb Syndrome. It's also a strong external characteristic of the presence of a Ghost. Based upon these and other distinct behavior patterns matched against European Police databanks, I conclude this person is Marcelo Jarti." ~ Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2004), S1E7 - IDOLATOR

Maybe the future is just full of EM blasters and jammers, made as easy to buy and hard to control as insanely overpowered laser pointers.

It's sickening to think that you're going to have to engage in actual electronic warfare with the world around you just to buy some milk for breakfast.

In order to save yourself from, what exactly? The local grocer having a picture of you in their store?

What do they need that for?

Also, such systems are primarily used by chain shops, and provided by specialized companies. Both mean the data gets shared to multiple entities.

You have a great point with the baggy pants. I think I'll go invest in Jnco.

Exoskeleton that walks with a pseudo-random gait.

“Did you find him in the video feed sir?”

“We got nothing via gait detection, but the intern noticed this guy walking around in an exoskeleton suit so we sent a unit out to bring him in”

Now remember, walk without rhythm, and we won't attract the worm.

Christ! At that point, you just give up and go live in the woods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz1M5i5Y4Qc&t=1m40s

Now you know the REAL reason that they banned Segways everywhere!

;)

I thought the workaround there was to put a handful of gravel in your shoes to disguise your gait

Are you always changing the amount of gravel every time you go out? These work arounds seem pretty unrealistic and likely you could try and train whatever variance they cause anyway into the model.

Can't wait for the next YC Demo Day darling: the first truly random gravel dispenser.

Turns out that it knocks around enough and ends up about as good as varying the amount. Lego pieces work too if you want a more lightweight solution.

Gait detection can be easily be fooled, you just wear some weird shoes that make walking hard in. Your gait will change drastically. Alternate between zero drop, heel and reverse heel.

Fast forward to the year 2050: "Why is everyone wearing ski boots and ski masks... it's 100 degrees?"

Imagine yourself tasked with solving this problem, how would you do it?

The first thing I would do is gather a bunch of data for people walking trying to mess up their gait. Different types of shoes, pebbles in shoes etc. Then include that in the model or even just look for that as suspicious itself.

You're not giving enough credit to the capability of the people that do this kind of work. It is not simple to avoid and the vast majority of people would not even go this far.

How many people communicate entirely over encryption today?

It's actually a hard problem that people who do this encounter and seems impossible to get right. We actually can tell if a friend is walking in the distance by looking at gait+clothes but could make mistkes as well, it's not 100% accurate. For surveillance reasons it's much easier to get 100 accuracy with just tagging people with microchips and that'a that. Why would we want to excel at gait-fingerprinting people?? That's a scary thing to want to perfect. Very Science fictiony and hopefully not prevalent in the future

Randomized inflating bladders under your toe and heel, change your shoe type as you walk!

> gait detection

not to be confused with galt detection, which tracks people who've read Atlas Shrugged and took its economic/political philosophy a little too seriously.

Laws are only as reliable as the integrity of those who write and enforce them.

I agree - that's why it's just as important to maintain the culture of western democracy, government driven by an idea and not by people. If we lose that then the laws won't protect us either.

A relevant description I heard that I liked was that democracy is a boulder at the top of a hill that was pushed there by the deaths of millions, ready to roll down at any time. It takes work to keep things in that state and to protect it.

And when they're being written by lobbyists from Wal-Mart and Target...

Or AT&T, GM, Amazon, and all the other biggest members of the Fortune 100.

Put a stone in your shoe and periodically move it to change your gait.

Gait detection is a joke, technically discredited, and only suitable for use by bad journalism. It does not work because it is so easily defeated: put a rock in your shoe, where your shoes on the wrong feet, or just injure a foot. Your gait is different.

Put a small pebble in your shoe. Alternate shoes regularly.

Maybe bell bottom pants will come back in fashion!

We are creating a really nice world. At work you have to wear headsets to be able to focus. And in the public you have to wear some variation of a tinfoil hat to avoid being tracked everywhere. Soon the idea of doing anything without the knowledge of dozens of companies and governments will be a quaint memory.

I saw an interesting hoodie with the brim of the hood was a row of flashing IR LEDs. I asked if they had forgotten to turn on their LEDs and they said "take a picture." I did and got just a bright glowy spot where their face should be. It was pretty impressive, but it would not be hard to put an optical filter on specific wavelengths from LEDs if that became more common.

we might be saved because security cameras use those same LEDs and their near IR sensitivity for "night vision" purposes.

if they filter it out, they don't have their "night vision" any more.

(obviously twice as many cameras, or more expensive ones, or whatever, could deal with it.)

Do sensor fusion of the IR-sensitive and non-IR sensitive cameras, and now you know who your biggest targets are, and they make themselves so very easy to follow!

Clearly Defcon needs a facial rec village next year, get through three rooms without having your face recognized to win :-)

No affiliation but was Googling round from your comment and found: http://www.reflectacles.com/

Nice, same concept in an easier to wear package. I love the idea of using the retroreflective tape on these things.

Now that's an arms race I can get behind! Cheap LEDs/filters in more than just the visible spectrum would be SUCH a boon to researchers.

Infrared LED devices are quite easily defeated using an appropriate filter. Doing this though introduces another problem: most security cameras use an array of infrared LEDs for lighting. These are ideal because they produce almost no visible light to the human eye, so they're relatively covert. You can block the infrared LED emissions, but then you also block a very useful source of "invisible" lighting in otherwise challenging areas.

I think a much bigger problem with your technique though is... seriously who wears an infrared LED baseball cap? You would be very easily identifiable because that technique is likely to be nearly unique in your store; your attempt to mask your identity would have the opposite effect of drawing more attention to it.

I smell a startup opportunity right here, make those hats a fashion must have and we have a crowd of infrared decoys that interrupt all cctv‘s... Problem would be law inforcement not being able to use any recordings. But otoh, back to the roots of criminal investigation! This comment may include some not so serious suggestions.

A retro reflective hat or sweater would work well in night time conditions, no?

Or at least be a good second feature.

Saturate the sensor in an environment that otherwise reflects little.

Even a small retro reflective logo can ruin a flash photo...

I just got a pair of these recently: https://www.reflectacles.com

Yikes, US$95 or US$125. May as well make your own with strips of DOT tape.

Having no experience with 3D printing, CAD, or knowledge of various reflectivity materials, I could spend the time necessary to chase those rabbits. Or I could just buy a pair.

The thing that fucks with me the most is people have already been born who will be tracked in stores their whole lives. Unless something changes that is.

The idea that you will be watched and tracked your whole life so that a store can better advertise/set up the store is terrifying. Honestly how the hell can it be legal?

>> can camera installers just add an additional infrared filter to their setup?

Yes - your smartphone camera already has one unless it's old and/or cheap.

Also, your LED baseball cap draws much more attention to you than anything else. That screams "look at me, I have something to hide". If you weren't on their radar before being seen in it, you almost certainly are afterwards.

That type of behavior can also trouble you in unrelated matters. EG, evidence of you wearing that to foil security cameras could be circumstantially presented to make you appear deceptive or conniving.

tldr; don't do anything to stand out if privacy is your goal.

As an adult, it's too late for you. But for your kids it's not too late to start. I saw infrared LED baseball caps at the local kids clothing store.

Any of the EDM LED Fashion eye wear (frames that glow colors) fully defeats FR. Any baseball cap with a blinky LED on will defeat FR. Wear a glow stick necklace, and it will defeat FR. The key is to create unnatural hot spots and shadows on a face that is not the type of imagery the ML was trained. Source: I write the software, I'm a lead FR developer.

One day I'll forget to charge my hat

High-end security cameras have day/night modes with IR cutoff filters. But yes, you're overly paranoid.

Why do they have that filter?

Cellphones don’t and take good pictures in day or night conditions.

Because you cannot have high-quality image, especially with good spectral content, both day and night, without an IR cutoff filter. Some cellphones do have IR filters, others can't take decent low-light photos. And many "secured areas" would actually have IR lights on to facilitate, well - visual surveillance.

Absurd that people are being driven to actually wear tinfoil hats on this skeever-hole of a planet.

So, you just made yourself the single biggest target on their radar, and you made absolutely certain that they will know exactly who you are and where you are -- at all times.

How exactly does that help?

Simpler solution: move to Europe.

You will blind people

why was I down voted for warning people against dangerous behavior