These anti-facial recognition glasses technically work, but won’t save you from our surveillance dystopia.

Even those makeup are kinda useless since they can track you to your door, see the cars you got in, the people you met, see if those people posted on social media if they know someone trying anti-facial recognition methods, etc. They can easily make a list of people prone to use anti-facial recognition that lives in or walks by certain areas then recognize them by body-type, height, walking rhythm…

Best thing is to destroy all the cameras near your house.

TonyOstrich
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503d

You aren’t wrong, but I still see two distinct benefits assuming there is an IR reflective or absorbent coating that can interfere with facial recognition.

  • For non government entities it makes direct tracking of individuals much harder (i.e. if you decide not to carry your phone or smart device any one company probably doesn’t know who you are).
  • For government entities it’s about making their job harder and increasing the error rate. You are right that they can still track someone via those means, but any time they have to correlate data or use multiple sources it does become more resource intensive in some way.

Realistically will either of the above matter? Probably not. For it to be effective a large portion of the population would need to care about their privacy, or even their principles above convenience, which they usually don’t. However, I can’t control what other people do, only what I do. So in this kind of situation I do my best to be a good example of the behavior I would like to see from others and do my best to not contribute to the Prisoner’s Dilemma or Tragedy of the Commons.

It’s not much, arguably it’s basically nothing, but it’s what I have.

I would also distinguish between investigations and drag nets. If they’re specifically looking into you and your business, then glasses won’t help. If they just want to identify 90% of people at a pretes pretest, these may be useful.

TonyOstrich
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63d

Great addition. That was what was kinda in my head, but I didn’t state it explicitly.

Some of those mean the more people that use anti facial recognition tools, the more effective they will be for everyone. So we should probably just encourage everyone to use it.

Alas Poor Erinaceus
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143d

They can easily make a list of people prone to use anti-facial recognition that lives in or walks by certain areas then recognize them by body-type, height, walking rhythm…

Which is why everyone should put stones in their shoes, especially if going to a protest. 🙂

I’d strongly advise against doing this every day. I developed osteoarthritis in my 20s just from my feet being slightly misaligned. Walking wonky can very easily permanently wreck your joints.

Are you going to protests every day?

They just said especially for protests, implying you’d best do it more often than that. Didn’t want anyone to take them too literally.

Even just protest shoes being different style then your normal ones probably make a difference. Different bag loadouts could affect it too.

Yeah, It’s one tool in the toolbox. and it won’t stop all those other things for sure, but products like this can help build awareness of the ubiquitous surveillance we live under. Awareness might eventually lead to policy change. So it’s not a bad thing, and the article does describe the limitations and weaknesses.

Also, not for nothing, I saw a test on YouTube (Dr. John Padfield - Business Reform) where his tests showed that IR reflective hats worked better than glasses.

Yeah, you might as well turn off your antivirus and firewall seeing as those can be bypassed by a skilled actor anyways.

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