Can we still avoid automatic face detection? · HackerPapers discussions

Can we still avoid automatic face detection? — mentioned by gcr

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:54:29 GMT

Hey I wrote a paper about this exactly ten years ago! https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504 I focused on facebook’s detector (not recognizer) for reasons explained in the intro, but face rec has come a long way since then.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Can we still avoid automatic face detection? — mentioned by jey

Sat, 04 Jun 2016 18:18:20 GMT

Click "PDF" on the right side and you get https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04504v1.pdf

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Can we still avoid automatic face detection? — mentioned by gcr

Sat, 04 Jun 2016 17:07:25 GMT

Yup yup! This was the screenscraping technique we used to turn Facebook into an automatic face detector: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504 It's a giant pain to screenscrape this using 'curl'. If I recall correctly, the bounding box coordinates I wanted are set as CSS properties inside inline HTML sent to the client wrapped up in a Javascript string literal as part of Javascript served to the client as the result of an AJAX call, if memory serves correctly. To get my screenscraper working, I had to do the AJAX call, parse the literal javascript, walk the AST to find the string literal I needed…

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Can we still avoid automatic face detection? — mentioned by gcr

Sat, 07 May 2016 17:28:08 GMT

If you don't want your face to be recognized, you can sometimes prevent it from being detected in the first place. Our research group recently looked into how to hide from Facebook's face detector. If you're uploading photos, adding white bars around the eyes of the subjects in the photo is the best way to prevent Facebook from finding the face. However, if you're out and about in the real world, even scarves and masks aren't enough--facebook sometimes finds these occluded faces too. There aren't very many easy answers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04504

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.