Digital privacy seems quite straightforward, because your digital devices are environments you more or less can have complete control over if you want to. But when you’re out and about, it’s a much more uncontrolled environment. There are cameras everywhere.
I wear face masks everywhere for a combo of protecting myself from illness and privacy. But the limitation is social acceptability. If anything good came out of covid it’s the normalisation of face masks, but you are far from unidentifiable if your only face covering is a covid mask. We’re lucky that sunglasses and hoodies on their own are fairly normal, but all of the above in combination would draw attention to you. And it’s definitely not socially acceptable to walk around in a balaclava.
The other thing is forensic data. If you don’t wear gloves, you’ll leave fingerprints everywhere, and hair too. I suppose wearing gloves is not particularly seen as weird or suspicious, but it just seems like there are a lot of considerations and challenges with preventing the state from knowing your every move when you leave the house.
What considerations do you make for IRL privacy, if any?
(Not particularly interested in “I don’t care about IRL privacy so I don’t do anything”—that’s fine and your choice, but ofc this question is aimed towards those who do care)
This is one of the greatest things that came out of the pandemic, though. Its no longer weird to walk around in a face mask. Its normalized in almost every country, instead of just Asians.
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not much I can do about CCTV (without breaching important social norms)
(without breaching important social norms)
But why would anyone who cares about privacy consider them more important?
Because breaching important social norms does the opposite of privacy, it draws attention to you.
Have fun not getting stopped by the police if you walk around with a balaclava, especially if you’re Black.
Their problem. We’re activists. We fight for rights, not compromise them.
Gotta say, I don’t think most peoples’ threat models make worrying about IRL privacy a concern, but that’s obviously not the point.
For the record, I don’t use any of these techniques myself, it’s just stuff I’ve read.
For facial recognition, a lot of CCTV cameras don’t have IR filters, and can be blinded with Infrared LEDs, so there have been some promising experiments with shoving a bunch of them into hats. You’ll glow real bright in any footage, but they won’t be able to see your face.
Beyond that, there’s always prosthetics (think like what is used in movies) to alter your facial characteristics.
All that said, I believe the main way of identifying individuals in camera footage now is by gait analysis. Supposedly a rock in your shoe can change it enough to not match up between different footage.
You’d also want to ditch your phone or put it in a signal blocking bag, as it can be uniquely identified by the saved wifi SSIDs that it tries to connect to, and by its bluetooth unique identifier (might just be the MAC address), that can be tracked by low energy bluetooth beacons (how stores track customer movement within and how most places did covid exposure tracing with the apps).
As far as fingerprints go, maybe a light layer of superglue on your fingertips to disrupt the print patterns? That’s a complete guess though.
Barely related, but I did see this recently and had a laugh
Edit: correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they misunderstood the abbreviation “cctv”. Mixing up “closed-circuit” and “closed-captioned”.
Nothing. The effort required to make a meaningful impact against this type of threat is way beyond my threat level.
