Masked facial recognition data is now being sold online in China

With masked facial recognition now becoming common in China, some of those images are showing up for sale for as little as US$0.007 each

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Passengers with face masks on in a Beijing subway station on March 6. (Picture: AP)

Published: 5:46pm, 30 Mar 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

The illegal sale of facial recognition data in China is nothing new, but now there’s a new twist: Facial images with masks are selling online. Now that AI can recognize masked faces, some of those images are being leaked and sold online for as little as 0.05 yuan (US$0.007) per image, according to a report by state-run China News Service.

Sellers told the news outlet that the masked facial images are crawled from public websites and gathered from social media. Some of the images are even from scans of people entering their office buildings or residential neighborhoods, although it’s not clear how these were gathered. One vendor reportedly sells a database of about 20,000 such images for 1,000 yuan (US$140).

The coronavirus outbreak has resulted in people wearing masks everywhere they go, thwarting facial recognition systems early on before pushing companies to adapt. By mapping more key points and gathering more accurate information from a person’s eyes and nose, some AI companies were able to overcome the challenge. There’s even a hack to get Apple’s Face ID to work with masks.

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Masked facial recognition data is now being sold online in China

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}With masked facial recognition now becoming common in China, some of those images are showing up for sale for as little as US$0.007 each

With masked facial recognition now becoming common in China, some of those images are showing up for sale for as little as US$0.007 each