Tricks to beat facial recognition and dodge Big Brother

Anti-AI makeup, leaving your phone at home and other arts of urban invisibility

Imagine a street camera identifying you and, within seconds, your face crossing a database. For those who distrust the surveillance state —and some have good reasons— the question is not whether it happens, but how to avoid it. In the corners of the internet, people share methods ranging from the rudimentary to the ingenious, without needing to be a terrorist or a incivil to want to go unnoticed.

Makeup as digital camouflage

The most talked-about trick is makeup designed to confuse facial recognition algorithms. Patterns of shadows and lines that break up the reference points AI uses to identify a face. The problem: it works better in a crowd. Wearing it alone raises suspicions. It is not exactly clown makeup, but something subtler; some compare it to military camouflage patterns.

The phone, the modern shackle

Leaving your smartphone at home is the radical solution. One user calls it "the so-called phone" and describes it as a voluntary GPS shackle. Cell tower geolocation is hard to evade, but disconnecting reduces your footprint. Another method: using umbrellas to shield your face from cameras. The irony is that in the United States there have already been arrests due to facial recognition false positives, which turns any error into a real risk.

The law that is not enforced, the debate that never ends

The Spanish Constitution guarantees privacy and the inviolability of the home. But, as was pointed out during the pandemic, the distance between the legal and the real is measured in impunity. Those taking part in this discussion are not bored forum users: they are citizens who have watched promises of freedom dissolve in the face of technology and a lack of accountability. In the end, dystopia is not science fiction: it is built every day with every camera pointed at us.