How to Disguise Yourself From Facial Recognition Systems

Our Take

404 Media's deep dive into anti-surveillance clothing is a genuinely useful watch, and credit to their team for digging into a corner of privacy tech that doesn't get enough attention. Patterns that confuse facial recognition, hoodies that fool thermal cameras, makeup that breaks up facial landmarks — it's clever stuff, and it speaks to a real anxiety a lot of Americans are feeling right now about being tracked at protests, during ICE operations, or just walking down the street.

But here's the catch that video doesn't get into: none of that gear does a thing to stop Flock Safety's ALPR network from logging your car. You can mask your face all day long, but if a Flock camera catches your plate, your make and model, your travel pattern, and your routine, the system doesn't care what you're wearing. These cameras aren't scanning faces — they're building a searchable database of where every car in a community goes, hour by hour, and sharing that data across agencies and jurisdictions with almost no public oversight.

That's why facial recognition evasion and ALPR awareness need to be part of the same conversation. Check our camera map to see what's tracking you in your own neighborhood, and head over to take-action for concrete steps on pushing back against your local department's surveillance contracts.