More Anti-Surveillance Fashion

The cameras, facial recognition, and snoopy cops without warrants haven’t gone away. Need new clothes for some reason?

Camouflage for Civilians

Previously, on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR), we’ve written about various kinds of clothing to resist blanket, warrantless surveillance. ^[1] Well… the cameras are still here along with near-universal distaste for this corporate and government imposition. That’s a potential market, and someone has decided to go for it.

The latest article ^[2] is from January 2023, so I’m (almost) embarrassed not to have found it for the previous blog post in October 2023. Still, better late than never.

It points us to an Italian clothing start-up called Cap_able or Capable Design. Their rather busily patterned clothing is made so not for visual appeal, but to deter surveillance. They’ve trained on YOLO (“You Only Look Once”), a fast object-detection algorithm. It either decides there’s nothing there, or identifies you as one of the animals encoded into the pattern in some way. Experimentally, it does seem to defeat human recognition algorithms (“is there a person here?”), but according to commenters it does not defeat facial recognition algorithms (“there is a human here, who is it?”).

While it may obscure you to some recognition algorithms (emphasis some, as they can’t test on all of them, most of which are kept secret), it makes you more conspicuous to humans. Lots of people will ask why you’re wearing something like that, I bet.

They claim their clothing is legal, in line with the European GDPR. Of course, more fascist-adjacent governments like the US will hurry to outlaw it, which will probably trigger interesting Supreme Court cases. Especially this bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court.

Now, this is a small operation: there are all of 8 products on their web site. Also, the price is not exactly affordable: shirts, pants, and dresses range from $412 to $745 each. This is, I suppose, much as one might expect of an Italian clothing start-up.

So, I dunno. I applaud giving ordinary folk the chance to resist constant surveillance. On the other hand, it’s trained on exactly 1 algorithm, kind of ugly, and very pricey.

The Weekend Conclusion

Here on this CLBTNR, we hate unbridled surveillance. But the cameras won’t go away, at least not until we make right-wing corporatist governments go away.

In the meantime: Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.

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Notes & References

1: Weekend Editor, “Anti-Surveillance Fashion Tips”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2023-Oct-10. ↩

2: P Bandara, “This Clothing Line Tricks AI Cameras Without Covering Your Face”, PetaPixel, 2023-Jan-20. ↩