I mean, masking during Covid while there were a lot of protesting events going on was a common crossover. Protect your identity and your health.
Unfortunately these spies do not need just faces for recognition. Gait is analyzed as well, among other things, so I'm not sure how effective it really is.
Side note: if government surveillance wants eyes on us, and masks prevent surveillance, would they have pushed masking for Covid? I don't really feel one way or the other on it, just a conspiracy curiosity.
The “experimentation” of Algorithmic Video-Surveillance (AVS) within the framework set by the “Olympic Games” law passed last year by the French Parliament is not an experiment at all: it is nothing more than a hypocritical maneuver designed to legalize, through small steps, a police infrastructure already massively deployed in France. To counter this strategy, La Quadrature du Net is launching a campaign aimed at fueling popular opposition to AVS, a technology based on Artificial Intelligence that amounts to a constant, automated monitoring of public spaces and marks a historic turning point in state surveillance. A complaint has also been lodged with the French data protection authority, the CNIL, as a way of denouncing the hypocrisy of the AVS promoters and pointing out the negligence of the personal data protection authority.
La surveillance bâtit son empire
Les Jeux Olympiques vont nous laisser la surveillance de masse en héritage. En instrumentalisant cet évènement, le gouvernement a autorisé l’utilisation de la vidéosurveillance algorithmique (VSA) jusqu’en 2025 pour des situations qui dépassent largement le cadre cette compétition sportive. Ces logiciels, qui analysent les images de vidéosurveillance et envoient automatiquement des alertes à la police, sont déployés depuis des années en France en toute illégalité, sans que jamais les responsables n’aient été inquiétés. L’hypocrisie est donc totale. En légalisant quelques usages de VSA, l’État souhaite légitimer un état de fait et amorcer un projet de surveillance bien plus large de l’espace public.
Dimanche, he explained that “potentially dangerous individuals" have been caught applying to work or volunteer at the Olympics, including 257 radical Islamists, 181 members of the far left, and 95 from the far right.