Defeating Facial Recognition: 13 Products Tested (Only 2 Worked!)

Our Take

Credit to Business Reform for actually buying and testing thirteen different "beat facial recognition" gimmicks instead of just speculating. The verdict — only two out of thirteen did anything useful — is the kind of reality check this space needs. There's a cottage industry of privacy products that sound clever in a headline but fall apart against real-world camera systems, and somebody needed to run the experiment.

The more important thread in this video is the New Orleans story: police quietly leaning on private facial recognition networks to do an end run around oversight. That's the pattern we track constantly with Flock Safety's ALPR network too — a web of cameras, often privately owned or HOA-funded, feeding into law enforcement databases with little public input and even less transparency about retention, sharing, or audit trails. Sunglasses and IR reflectors might buy you a little friction against a camera pointed at your face, but they do nothing about the license plate reader logging every car that passes a given intersection, building a time-stamped map of where you've been.

That's why personal countermeasures, however well-tested, can only go so far. The real fix is knowing where this infrastructure actually sits and pushing back on it politically. Check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to do something beyond gadgets, our take-action page has concrete steps for pressuring local officials on ALPR contracts and policies.