Anti-Surveillance Clothing Confuses Face Recognition

Anti-surveillance is the new black:

New anti-surveillance clothing has been developed, allowing wearers to prevent security cameras which use facial recognition technology from recognizing them. The clothing uses complex colored patterns of digitalized faces, and parts of faces, to overload and trick facial recognition software.

The patterned design of the clothing overwhelm and confuse facial recognition systems by presenting them with too many faces to read simultaneously.

Mashable reports that the clothing was produced as part of the Hyperface project, which prints patterns of eyes, noses, and mouths onto clothing and textiles.

Computer algorithms on which facial recognition technology relies recognize these complex patterns printed on the cloths as a face, and try to match the “face” to a real face in the database. The algorithms find themselves having to deal with so many “faces” at once, that they do not know which of the faces is the real one.

Adam Harvey, a Berlin-based artist and technologist, is behind the Hyperface project. He was also behind an earlier anti-surveillance, the CV Dazzle, which also aimed to disrupt facial recognition software.

The earlier project developed a dazzling florescent makeup and hairstyling which disrupted surveillance software…

In his CCC talk, Harvey presented the audience with a street scene from 1910, in which every passerby wore a hat that covered their face.

“In 100 years from now, we’re going to have a similar transformation of fashion and the way that we appear.

When the revolution begins, people will be printing out stickers with their license plate numbers and sticking them on delivery trucks, putting stickers with pictures of their faces on taxis, and wearing white see-through balaclavas and sunglasses everywhere. I could even see everyone settling down on a standard outfit, like a red hoodie and blue jeans, so when they hit the street, they disappear into a sea of identical individuals in white balaclavas, red hoodies, and blue jeans. Assuming you had the battery out of your cell phone, and your credit cards and IDs were in a foil faraday wrapping in your pocket, and you were not somehow “tagged,” it would make following you quite difficult.

And you thought everyone dressed the same and shaved their head in the future because they were trying to be a seamless part of the collective. In reality, they were all trying to lose their surveillance coverage.

Talk about r/K Theory, because once everyone is talking about it, the only way to disappear into the crowd will be talk about it too