👀🚫 A researcher named Bill Swearingen just proved something huge at Def Con: patterns you can print on clothes or wrap around a car that make you invisible to surveillance camera detection. After 31 million tests, his patterns now defeat every major algorithm he's thrown at them, including the software running Flock license plate readers and Clearview AI.
I'm genuinely glad someone's building this. Facial recognition and license plate readers have wrongly flagged innocent people, gotten them pulled over at gunpoint, even jailed, over AI errors that were never caught or corrected in time. People shouldn't have to prove their innocence to a camera that was wrong in the first place.
But I can't ignore the other side of this. The same pattern that protects an innocent person from wrongful surveillance can just as easily let an actual criminal walk right past the cameras meant to catch them, or make it harder to identify someone who's genuinely a threat to their community. Tech like this doesn't know the difference between someone protecting their rights and someone evading consequences.
It's a real tradeoff, and I don't think there's a clean answer yet.
🔗 https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/this-adversarial-pattern-can-prevent-surveillance-cameras-from-detecting-you/
#Privacy #Surveillance #FacialRecognition #Cybersecurity #TechNews
Zuri (he/him) ❌️👑 | 🕐 CET
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