This R8,000 sweater will help you outsmart facial recognition
Cameras will be bamboozled into believing it's looking at a giraffe instead of a human.
Whether it's being used to unlock a smartphone or track down criminals, facial recognition is everywhere.
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Since becoming a more regular fixture in our daily lives, some people are worried that the data that is collected by governments and big companies could be used in malicious ways.
Italian startup Cap-able is a privacy-focused design team who are creating fashionable clothing that will outsmart any facial-recognition technology.
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One of the most obvious and effective ways to deceive facial recognition involves wearing some kind of mask but Cap-able has found a loophole that doesn't need you covering your face.
The company was started by Federica Busani and Rachele Didero, who learned about facial-recognition technology while studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
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Their debut project, The Manifesto Collection, has recently gone on sale after nine months of research and testing and it is based on animal patterns.
The Manifesto Collection was created to create awareness of the risks associated with the improper use of facial recognition technology. Biometric data is extremely sensitive information and is currently not safeguarded by any law: the biometric data of people wearing Cap_able technology is not stored by the large databases where it is combined with personal data to profile each citizen.
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The patterns were developed by an artificial intelligence algorithm and use animal-inspired shapes to trick the software which then identifies an animal instead of a human.
They have also patented the fabric they use with sponsorship by the Polytechnic University of Milan.
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The collection boasts a range of knitted pants, hoodies, t-shirts and dresses and will cost you anything from R8,000 per item.
Below you can see the Cap-able knitwear in action as the team used YOLO, an algorithm for real-time object detection, to test their designs.
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They did tell Insider that their garments are not faultless and that there is always room for improvement but 60% of people wearing the clothes while testing was identified as animals such as giraffes and zebras.
Either way, it seems like it really is a jungle out there.
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Main image courtesy of Cap-able Design