Privacy is (also) a matter of design. No, we are not referring to the masks that we are forced to use now, which have very little design and which in any case - it has been discovered - do not prevent facial recognition, the last frontier of technological invasion into people's lives. To protect yourself from facial identification systems widely used in China, the first country hit by the coronavirus but not only (think of Singapore), for population surveillance, there are also more "stylish" tools. One of these, reported by US journalist James Hansen in his newsletter Note Design, is the one conceived by the Polish designer Ewa Nowak, who thought of trying to confuse the identification algorithms by inventing what she calls “face jewelry”, i.e. facial jewellery.
Nowak has tried various models, but the most effective one – christened “Incognito” - consists of two brass circles masking the cheekbone line together with another strip of the metal that reaches on the forehead. All worn like a pair of glasses. Sure, a little bulkier and not exactly conventional: someone might laugh at it or ask us if it's a carnival dress, but in the meantime this would be a valid and effective solution to get around the unpleasant feeling of being constantly spied on, whether it's from the police, private cameras or social network algorithms. After all, this does not only happen in China or in distant places: Facebook itself uses the algorithm DeepFace to automatically recognize your friends' photos as they are posted. According to the company, it works with an accuracy level of 97,47%.
Nowak's answer to the question of how to get back some privacy was even honored in a recent edition of the Łódź Design Festival in Poland. However, when the designer proposed to present several of her designs at an exhibition at the National Museum of China, her first, harmless optical games, were accepted; Incognito, on the other hand, was "firmly" rejected.
