Some shirts hide you from cameras—but will anyone wear them?
The world, when we eventually enter it again, is waiting for us with millions of digital eyes—cameras, everywhere, owned by governments and private entities alike. Pretty much every state out there has some entity collecting license plate data from millions of cars—parked or on the road—every day. Meanwhile all kinds of cameras—from police to airlines, retailers, and your neighbors' doorbells—are watching you every time you step outside, and unscrupulous parties are offering facial recognition services with any footage they get their hands on.
Goldstein and a team of students late last year published a paper studying "adversarial attacks on state-of-the-art object detection frameworks." In short, they looked at how some of the algorithms that allow for the detection of people in images work, then subverted them basically by tricking the code into thinking it was looking at something else....what if you make a point of being seen, and in doing so generate enough noise in a system that a single signal becomes harder to find?
That's the approach designer Kate Bertash takes with her Adversarial Fashion product line, which she presented at DEFCON in 2019. Her prints are designed first and foremost to mess with automatic license plate readers (ALPR), systems that scoop up images from the fronts and backs of everyone's cars all over the country and hoover them into massive databases.
The trick to expansion is threefold. First, people have to be interested in wearing adversarial designs. Second, the design actually has to work as intended. And third: the design has to be something you wouldn't mind being seen wearing while also, ideally, being good-looking enough that others will want to wear it, too.
See the full story here: https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/04/some-shirts-hide-you-from-cameras-but-will-anyone-wear-them/