The GLAMOUFLAGE t-shirts (SCN)

With Facebook recently changing its terms of service to use the algorithmic likeness of your face, and with the ongoing jubilee of NSA news, there’s been renewed interest in thwarting facial recognition algorithms.

According to Wired, a Dutch artist and designer now claims to successfully confuse Facebook’s algorithms with a special kind of t-shirt.

But first, a history. In the past half decade, artists have experimented with computer vision dazzle camouflage, or “CV dazzle.” CV dazzle seeks to obstruct and confuse cameras or other computer sensors to keep them from detecting people. When they detect a face in a photo or search for a human heat signature, computers are looking for certain patterns; confuse those patterns, and they don’t know there was a human there.

Though William Gibson prophesied about “the ugly t-shirt,” a shirt so ridiculous its wearer would be invisible to surveillance cameras, the artist Adam Harvey invented the term “CV dazzle.” Harvey’s work is the best known. Tim Maly (a friend of ours here at The Atlantic tech channel) spoke to him in January for Wired about his anti-drone garments and shawls. My favorite work of his, though, may be his anti-facial recognition make-up and hair-dos.

A 1919 painting by Arthur Lismer of the Olympic, a Canadian troop ship outfitted with dazzle camouflage.

Dazzle takes its name from a type of naval camouflage (and otherwise) used in the world wars. Huge, jarring stripes were painted on ships, less with the intent to conceal them in the water and more with the idea of disorienting enemy weapons and maneuvering. CV dazzle applies the same concept to algorithms.