“After testing the Face ID system for a long time, I realised that to block 3D infrared facial mapping all we had to do was block our eyes from being seen from these technologies,” he told BIRN.

“If 3D IR mapping/scanning does not see the eyes, it is not able to understand the information as a face.”

Asked who buys his glasses, Urban, who sells via his website, said his customers come from across the political spectrum.

“In these days of polarisation and division, privacy is a unifier,” he said. “Nobody talks about it because it actually brings us closer together, but privacy advocates can be found from the far-right to the far-left and everywhere in between.”

“Surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.”

When Apple released its new iPhone X, which included a facial recognition system, in 2017, Urban responded with new models of eyeglasses that blocked infrared.

Overfeed the beast

Like Urban, most activists have focussed their efforts on hiding the facial traces that recognition systems are taught to identify.

American conceptual artist Leo Selvaggio, however, is doing the exact opposite.

Selvaggio has made available online an unlimited number of prosthetic masks reproducing his own features to help the public hide their real identity from facial recognition systems.