10 Pieces of Fashion You Can Wear to Confuse Facial Recognition

I hate to break it to you, but a world where your every move can be tracked using facial recognition has gone from science fiction to an everyday reality. Facial recognition is common at airports, concerts, and stores, its in our schools, and you might even have to use it to file your taxes. Some people are willing to trade privacy for safety, but facial recognition has serious, built-in flaws that limit its accuracy. The technology may already be responsible for putting innocent people in jail.

But with a little ingenuity and a flexible definition of style, there are clothes and accessories you can wear that can confuse the algorithms and keep your face undetectable. I wouldn’t bet my life on them working in all circumstances, but some of these outfits have science backing their anti-face-rec claims.

Facial recognition is a tool that uses so-called “computer vision” technology to identify patterns. Sometimes it’s just recognizing that there is a human face in an image, but it can be trained on the contours of individual faces to spot specific people as well.

Essentially, these dystopian duds work by introducing new patterns specially designed to distract or confuse the image recognition software, leaving you to go about your business undetectable. Some of them look pretty cool too.

Click through for our selection of some of the more interesting garments. Some of them are available for purchase, though some are just forward-looking art-objects.