Adam Harvey is at it again.
Back in 2013, we told you about his line of clothing that helps hide you from aerial drones and other surveillance.
The artist and independent researcher is now developing the Hyperface Project, which prints patterns onto clothing and textiles that render your face illegible to surveillance systems.
The patterns fool facial recognition by presenting “computer vision devices” that overload facial recognition software with patterns that closely resemble facial features like eyes and mouths. This diverts the “attention” of the surveillance programs away from your actual face.

If facial recognition doesn’t scare you yet, consider this: Facebook’s facial recognition software is so good that you can give it a photo of a full baseball stadium, and can “figure out how many people are sitting or standing in a picture, whether they’re smiling or not, if the background is indoors or out, and whether there’s a baseball game under way in the shot,” according to tech website The Next Web.
And researchers from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China revealed they had built an artificial intelligence algorithm that can “identify criminals by the curvature of their lip.”
One would think an ugly shirt is a small price to pay to stop computers from following your every move, or from interpreting your behavior as criminal because you have a certain look on your face.
But if that’s not your cup of tea, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a 3D-printed pair of sunglasses that cost exactly 22 cents to make. The sunglasses, according to the study performed by the researchers, fools advanced facial recognition software by altering small bits of color information in a face.
You can also use this low tech way to beat high tech thermal vision-based systems from our colleague Brandon Smith, who has long advocated for development of more innovations to counter the police state we live in.