Not at those prices!
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But does it work?
He emphasised that because surveillance systems are so powerful, no design can guarantee security from detection, but said “the added value of fashion is to spread awareness and help propagate public discourse”.
Preuß said his designs used large-scale prints, asymmetrical cuts and streetwear-inspired silhouettes to confuse facial recognition algorithms. The company said its Urban Ghost coat integrates LEDs into the hood that emit infrared light to dazzle night-vision surveillance cameras.
Preuß, who co-founded his company after reading about the whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about US surveillance in the Guardian, said his designs played with the fact that “facial recognition systems freak out when they see multiple faces at once”.
“Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said.
Bell, however, said “none of these products are tried and tested, and a lot of these surveillance technologies can deal with a little resistance … [but] even if the designs don’t necessarily work perfectly, fashion is also a visible sign of resistance.
Still not sure.
Oh look, capitalism trying to sell you something by calling it a solution to your problem. The problem that it created in the first place. This doesn't seem familiar at all.
Most of these countermeasures are easily thwarted by adjustments to the CV model, meaning even if they do work upon release (a big if) the countermeasure itself eventually becomes just another uniquely identifying feature.
If we’re doing adversarial, let’s do adversarial. Like high-wattage IR lasers to permanently destroy photo receptor arrays, cheap narrowband signal jammers to push wireless chips beyond thermal limit causing early heat death, directional EMP to fry logic boards, and so forth.
Bullshit title: "adversarial" implies that one's personal security is counter to gov't interests, and that it's the citizens' fault for behaving so. 🤬
Won't work. Try something like https://www.amazon.com/Custom-Printed-Face-Mask-Personalized/dp/B0FW42TZ6H rather. Won't obscure your gait biometrics.
Throw a pebble in your shoe to change your walk. Wear a smaller or bigger shoe on one foot. Wear knee and ankle braces on one leg....
There are easy ways to change your gait for an outing.
Fortunately gait biometrics are junk science anyway lol
As if that stops police from using it to target randos or prosecutors from using it in court. The executive branch REALLY loves its junk science.
If anything, that re-enforces quick_snail's point that all these individualistic anti-surveillance tips and tricks are pointless.
Even if you did succesfully change your gait and wear black and use a special phone and didn't attend the action they're accusing you of attending, they'll jiggle the random number generator until it says you're guilty (p<0.05).
There is a point in a surveillance state where it makes more sense to [REDACTED] fascists in plain view rather than waste energy trying to do anything subversively. Either follow the CIA manual on malicious compliance or blow up a pipeline, no real middle ground.
Machine learning is getting quite good at it https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S1546221824001802
Doesn't sound that good that changing clothes is one of the problems they are facing. What about different camera angles and heights in imaging that is an issue also.
Get someone to kick you in the leg hard every few days to change your limp.
Reminds of the dazzle makeup article from a decade ago. Shame that never caught on. I hope this does.
wear a politician styled mask, commit a crime, system flags politician as criminal, repeat.
Everyone should just agree to wear the same clothing all the time. Maybe black pants and shirt. Remove it as a differentiator.
Not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc
I could easily do this with one of those custom mall tshirts circa the 1990s that you could get printed to commemorate a graduation or remember a dead baby or w/e
Sunglasses, hat, and facemask.
Two notes. The first, I don't like the name. These are defensive measures against adversarial systems. Calling these clothes adversarial clothing implies they're the bad guys and the tracking system are the good guys. The second note is more of a question... where are they available?
Edit. Misspelling
Last time they were in the media, I found their web site. That ugly sweater cost over a hundred Euro (don't remember if it was two or seven, but at that point it no longer matters).
I'm hoping for such patterns to become open source (and less hard on human eyes).
They are hard on human eyes and also very obvious to human eyes is a major problem. I am hoping for there to be regular clothes that allow for strong facial-recognition/AI shielding that is futureproofed, but at the same wouldn't be so obvious to regular human observers.
I just ordered new glasses the other day and sprung for an IR-blocking lens coating when I saw it was an option. Who knows if it'll help much, but it can't really hurt (aside from me possibly not liking the pink sheen they apparently have).
What do you think in it well do? Daytime nothing at all. Night not sure. And only if they have IR lights on the cameras which is becoming less and less needed. I have cameras at home they ambient light is enough and some still have colour. And that is me purchasing inches pass cameras.
this is the most recent arxiv paper on adversarial clothing (since a lot of people are speculating about if it's possible): [2511.16020] Physically Realistic Sequence-Level Adversarial Clothing for Robust Human-Detection Evasion https://share.google/VMhtGB8P2kTMorGx6
they boast an 80%+ success rate at evading the instance level (each time you walk past an ai enabled camera) detection with sequential models (more difficult to fool as they see more of your sillouette).
not saying they are fashionable and obviously aren't commercially available yet, but it definitely seems possible.
my main complaint is i wish these companies could make a good baseline so we could compare their efficacy. evaluating the trade off with the level of drip.
Me: broke because I bought an entire wardrobe to beat the man.
3 days later
Flock: pushes out update to fix the issue.
This is just a rehash of the "dazzle" makeup trend that popped up in the last 15 years (which is already ineffective).
And given the fact that it's mass produced, so likely fast fashion, is just more promises of safety by buying onto the capitalist machine. A quote from the owner says it all:
“Those wearing these products are the vanguard. The mainstream is quickly coming up behind them, helped by the fact that bigger companies will see the potential for profit and will push the trend into the popular, public domain, changing the way we dress on a large scale.”
Did you catch that? If you buy in, you're the vanguard, a revolutionary, leading the poor normies against their capitalist oppressors by buying shit! Capitalism is thoroughly defeated by this one trick!
Nobody is coming to save us. You can't buy your way out of surveillance. If you want to fight back for real, organize, vote, and/or act. Support local initiatives to reject Flock cameras and data centers. Contribute to efforts to map where cameras are. Set up Meshtastic or Mesh Core nodes. Run for local office. Call/visit your reps to the point they do what you want just so you stop annoying them.
Don't fall for capitalism masquerading as activism.
"Hey Bill, the system just flagged this guy as unknown."
"Oh fancy pants over there? That's just Dave. The automated cameras flag him as unknown but since he's the only one wearing that stuff we still know it's him."
I can't participate because I require extra tall sizes that I ALREADY struggle with obtaining. Surely no adversarial clothing is being produced in these sizes.
I wondered about this for cars and ALPR cameras. Could you cover your car in license plates and overwhelm the cameras?
I just ordered new glasses the other day and sprung for an IR-blocking lens coating when I saw it was an option. So for me, yes.
Be aware that it tints the lenses slightly blue, and it feels like you're inside a pool looking out into the world. I couldn't handle it.
Edit. But they did seem to work, at least somewhat. On my security camera, the lenses were black. My face unlock wouldn't work when I had them on. But my phone still recognized my face as a face, just not my face.
Hmm, interesting. The website warns of a pink sheen that someone else sees looking at you, but not a blue tint when you're looking through it.
Welp, hopefully my wife and I don't mind because they're already ordered and shipped. We also ordered some cheap pairs with no fancy features at all, so we'd still have other new glasses if we don't like these, but it'd still be a shame to feel the need to return them.
The pink sheen was there, but I didn't care. I don't see it, so it doesn't bother me, the wearer. The blue did bother me. Hopefully it won't bother you two.
My glasses have arrived and I can confirm that they have no blue tint that I can see. (Not just an unobtrusive tint, no tint at all.)
It kinda makes me think yours might've been made wrong, with an accidental blue tint separate and in addition to the ID Guard coating.
I'm also happy that the pink is only a sheen that appears at certain angles, and not something that makes it look like I'm wearing pink glasses as a fashion choice.
I'm really glad it didn't affect you, honestly. It was super annoying. And you may have been right about the defect. They accepted the return super easily, without the questions that normally (rightfully) come with an unreusable return. Or, alternatively, maybe others have mentioned it, and they altered their process to reduce/resolve the blue tint? Either way, I'm glad it's no longer the case, and, given your experience, I may just try those lenses again at a later date! I've always been impressed with Zenni's quality.
I was considering selling bumper stickers with adversarial noise targeting the image segmentation portion of AI-using ALPRs.
In many states you can't put anything over your license plate that would make it unreadable. However, you can put all the bumper stickers you'd like on your car.
I got the idea from Benn Jordan on YT (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ), he was training for noise to apply over the license plate... so he had to constrain the noise to being unobtrusive so as to not block the license plate.
However, if you're not limited by that you could create images that AI, during segmentation, would detect as a license plate and send a garbage image to OCR.

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