Protect Your Privacy Online: How To Stop Facebook From Spying On You With Smart Fashion

A German inventor hopes his plan to add print patterns on clothes will prevent businesses from marketing toward people based on their online activities. The new "HyperFace" technology seeks to camouflage computer users by putting patterns on clothes that would make it appear as if they had multiple eyes and mouths, which would confuse facial recognition programs, according to a Guardian report Wednesday.

Companies have been able to learn about individual’s spending habits by developing methods such as facial recognizing through the computer’s camera. "HyperFace" hopes its imitation facial features will cloud the systems from being able to tell which faces were real and subsequently misinterpret the emotional reactions detected towards certain online products.

The product was slated to hit the market in a textile print on Jan. 16, 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, after being in the works since 2013.

"Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an anti-face,” the creator of the project, Adam Harvey, said on his website.

Harvey, a Berlin-based artist and entrepreneur, said in addition to the product being able to be worn to “divert the gaze of the computer vision algorithm,” it can also be used as a blanket to mask someone’s location.

“It can be used to modify the environment around you, whether it’s someone next to you, whether you’re wearing it, maybe around your head or in a new way,” Harvey, said while addressing the Chaos Communications Congress hacking conference in Hamburg, Germany on Dec. 12, 2016.

Amazon scans people’s faces at its checkout-less grocery store in Britain. And without people’s permission, Facebook searches pictures of its users in order to add tags about their locations. Facebook has been accused of selling the information from its users’ tagged photos to advertisers, which is not illegal in the United States. Google’s cloud-based photo service also uses facial recognition technology.

Facebook was able to recognize its user’s faces with a 97.35 percent accuracy rate by using the services of a company called Deepface, according to a Bloomberg Technology article on Oct. 26, 2015. Humans were supposedly able to identify people by their faces with an accuracy rate of 97.5 percent.

Harvey said in researching his new technology, he found that there were up to 47 different emotional reactions that companies were able to discover about consumers from a 100 by 100-pixel facial image, which is just 2.5 percent of the size of most Instagram photos. For example, he said researchers from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai claim to be able to predict criminal activity from the shape of people’s lips or the distance between their eyes.

“The real criminal, in these cases, are people who are perpetrating this idea, not the people who are being looked at," said Harvey.