New technology developed by a Beijing start-up can recognize individuals by the way they walk and is more unique to an individual than facial recognition.
Gait biometric systems capture step patterns using video images and then convert the collated data into a mathematical equation. Gait as a biometric measure can be influenced by several factors, including footwear, terrain, fatigue, and injury.
...Love this sub, I don't have hardcore needs in terms of privacy, but wanted to know for people that enjoy a covid mask, their opinion on Gait Rec. Technologies, and does any one have any intel in throwing these systems off, whether or not that is impossible?
I’m sure the companies selling the software want people to think that. Automatic Fingerprint ID has enough false positives, I can’t imagine this wouldn’t be worse.
This and the initial article are central plot points in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.
It's a YA novel about a guy who helps organize resistance against the government by hacking Xboxes. There are at least 2 sex scenes. The ending is deeply unsatisfying, perhaps because the author wanted to convey that he alone cannot possibly succeed
Depends on the tech, but essentially you need to adjust stride length, foot pronation/supination, knee extension and a bunch of things about hip alignment.
Someone walking while looking at their phone will ID differently than the same person walking fast while trying not to run.
BUT, in the same context with the same footwear, these systems are pretty accurate. So in places with CCTV, they can be pretty quick at tagging and filtering regular repeated activity. That way, it’s the unrecognized gaits that get flagged up for investigation.
If I wear boots, sneakers, sandals, hiking shoes sometimes I wonder if it will be enough to throw it off? How distinctly will it be able to tell from millions of gait patterns? Sure it may work foolproof for a set of 100 even intentionally trying to vary things, but how similar will the gait of Roberto Ramirez be to himself the next week or to the hundreds of thousands of people going past an area over a year?
As I recall yes. When the tech was new several years ago, just wearing flip-flops or jandels or whatever-you-call-them was enough to completely throw it off.
I definitively walk differently in e.g., Birks, generic sandals, and generic slip-on closed-toe shoes.
Each one is quite consistent and recognizable, unfortunately, which puts me in a position of few options for working around this sort of technology. If you see me in Birks a decade ago, you'll know me in Birks today without having to see anything above my hip.
Knew this was coming at scale sooner or later. Something of a concern to me personally, because my own gait is particularly identifiable to those who know me.
Aside from footwear, and possibly using various inserts to change the way one's foot falls on the ground, I don't have any obvious thoughts for defeating this unfortunately. The problem with any sort of inserts is that they're likely to cause other problems over time for the same reason they could theoretically mask one's gait - unnatural walking tends to be bad for the body on the whole, and to cause more widespread problems over time.