In November 2019, Maria, our Design and Outreach Officer, ran a workshop on how to hide from facial recognition at The Warren youth club in Hull, with DefendDigitalMe and Privacy International.

This was part of the Warren’s  #YouAreWhatYouShare campaign on data privacy aiming to fight the exploitation of young people’s data. Watch the video below for a summary of the event.

In 2019, CRIN participated in the Tate Exchange event ‘Beta Utopia’ where Privacy International, CRIN and the Digital Maker Collective collaborated to create a workshop on hiding from facial recognition. We used a Processing sketch using Open CV in order to demonstrate a basic facial recognition tool and Privacy International used face make-up in order to break-up facial features, thus hiding the user from the recognition device.

Thanks to the Digital Maker Collective’s technical support, we were able to run a successful demo and got the youth at the Warren to play with face paint in order to understand the tool.

Jen (DefendDigitalMe) and Caitlin (Privacy International) talked to the youth members and broke down several complex concepts regarding data collection and the importance of data privacy and children’s digital rights. Other activities prepared by the Warren, such as a T-shirt printing workshop and a digital vocal workshop and many more, all focussed on data privacy and technology.

At the end of the day, we got to share the Processing sketch to the youth members at the Warren, in case any of them wish to experiment with programming and facial recognition in the future.