Biometric concealment

Contents

Biometric concealment includes any practice that obscures biometric identifiers (unique physical or biological characteristics) that can be used for identification purposes.

See the “Facial recognition” topic and the chapter “Traces” in PRISMA.

Techniques addressed by this mitigation

NameDescription
Forensics
Facial recognition

You can wear a mask to cover your facial features, and sunglasses or a hat with a low brim to cover your eyes.

Gait recognition

You can wear baggy clothing that hides your body shape, use an umbrella or other concealing objects, or drastically change your walking style by adopting a “funny walk”.

Handwriting analysis

An adversary can identify the characteristics of a writing sample to identify its author. To mitigate this, if you are writing an incriminating text and you want to conceal your handwriting:

  • If you don't need to hide that you are concealing your handwriting, you can take as many of the following measures as possible:
    • Hold the writing instrument in an unusual way. For example, if you normally hold a pen in your right hand, hold it in your left hand instead.
    • Use a writing style that produces generic rather than unique characters. For example, use uppercase block letters rather than cursive.
    • Pause for a few seconds between each character to avoid unconsciously falling back into your writing habits.
    • Keep the text as short as possible.
  • If you need to hide that you are concealing your handwriting, you can use a handwriting that looks natural but does not feature the characteristics of your normal handwriting. This is difficult and may take years of practice.
Linguistics

You can hide the acoustic properties of your voice to mitigate voice identification.

Mass surveillance
Video surveillance

When filmed by surveillance cameras, you can:

  • To prevent gait recognition, wear baggy clothing that hide your body shape, use an umbrella or other concealing objects, or drastically change your walking style by adopting a “funny walk”.
  • To prevent facial recognition, wear a mask to cover your facial features, and sunglasses or a hat with a low brim to cover your eyes.