Hyper-realistic silicon masks fool eight out of ten people in new study raising identity check fears
- Researchers at the University of York tested how sensitive people are to masks
- They created a mock passport control point in a museum and sent someone in a silicon mask to wander through the crowds
- They found around eight out of ten people didn’t notice the man in the mask
According to a new study from the University of York, people are terrible at detecting whether those around them are wearing masks.
Researchers from the University of York, led by Rob Jenkins and a group from Mike Burton’s FaceVar Lab, investigated just how attentive to disguises the average person would be in a public setting.
The created a mock airport border passport control point at the London Science Museum, and asked 54 subjects to evaluate a person in a realistic silicon mask trying to cross the border by comparing his in-person appearance to that of an ID photo.
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Researchers from the University of York found as many as eight out of ten people wouldn’t notice someone wearing a silicon mask in their presence if they weren’t already on the lookout for someone in a mask
Only 13 percent of respondents said the man should be held for further questioning because he was in a mask, according to a report from Phys.org.
An additional 11 percent said they had suspected he was wearing a mask, but not until after the researchers had brought up the possibility in a question.
‘Overall, mask detection was poor and was not predicted by unfamiliar face matching performance,’ Jenkins et al reported.
‘We conclude that hyper-realistic face masks could go undetected during live identity checks.’
For those that had detected the person wearing a mask, the giveaways were mostly subtle.
One said said the mask wearer’s hairline ‘doesn’t look quite right,’ while another noticed his expression never seemed to change.
The results were a follow-up to an earlier experiment in which subjects were shown photos of two similar looking people and asked to choose which one was wearing a mask
The test builds on an earlier experiment from Jenkins and his group, which presented test subjects with photos of two similar faces, one a person in a realistic mask and the other not wearing any disguise at all.
Subjects incorrectly guessed which of the two people was wearing a mask in one of every five instances.
Jenkins suspected the error rate would likely be much higher in settings where subjects weren’t consciously looking for signs of a mask.
‘People have used face masks in disguise for a very long time,’ Jenkins said. ‘But technology has advanced through things like special effects that are used in Hollywood to the point where we’ve got masks that are so realistic that people might not even realize they’re looking at a mask at all.’
According to the University of York team, silicon masks have become so realistic in recent years they’ve been able to fool law enforcement and border control agents in airports
In recent years, people have used masks to get away with a shocking range of different behavior.
In 2010, a man from Hong Kong passed through Passport Control and boarded a flight to Canada while wearing a detailed silicon mask of an elderly white man.
He was later caught not by passport control but when a fellow passenger saw him remove the mask on the plane mid-flight.
In 2016, a white man in Kentucky pulled off a series of robberies wearing a silicon mask that made him appear like a black man, and police mistakenly arrested a black suspect based on surveillance footage.
The real robber was eventually turned in to police by his girlfriend, who found the mask in his apartment.
