Artificial intelligence based facial recognition is improving over time. However, it is a bit too good at recognising faces as two recent stories illustrate. The first problem is Google’s automatic facial recognition as used to blur faces in Street View imagery, tends to err on the over eager side and ends up blurring faces of statues, people in paintings, and now even a cow. Read more about it here (expect a lot of bovine puns).
A cow in Cambridge, England, has its face blurred for privacy reasons. See in Street View
The second story found here and here says that artificial intelligence based facial recognition can still identify faces fairly accurately even with face blurring. This would suggest that Google’s efforts to blur people’s faces in Street View may soon be thwarted and they will need to redo it all with a more secure method. The easiest reliable method is to completely cover faces with a square of solid colour. Another sightlier alternative would be to subtly warp faces in addition to blurring them so as to fool facial recognition algorithms. This should work until reliable body recognition becomes common place (yes that’s a real thing and probably works even better on cows than facial recognition does).