There are currently more than 85 million surveillance cameras installed in the U.S. It's an average of one camera for every four people. Globally, it's estimated that there are currently 1 billion active security cameras. All of them watching you, tracking you, ingesting you as yet another piece of data without you realizing it. But what if you could fight back? Resist the onslaught of unwanted digital scanning you're subjected to every day? Turns out that the key to protecting your identity may just be hanging in your closet. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Style Theory, the show that our AI overlords at YouTube have delivered to your feed because somewhere along the line, the data around your watch habits told some algorithm that you're likely gonna enjoy this video. Don't fool yourself, friends. None of us have any choice here. Watch and consume. Watch and consume. You know what else I suspect you probably like? Your privacy. Having some control over how your likeness gets stored and distributed? Well, too bad. That is so last millennium. The reality is that in an average week, your image is captured on a security camera an average of 78 times. That is a lot, right? We're talking over 10 times a day. Well, guess what? I'm lying to you. In reality, you're getting captured an average of 238 times in a given week. That is 34 times a day. How many of those are you aware of? How many of those did you consent to? Does it feel weird to know that your image is just out there, floating around somewhere, captured and held by people that you don't know and will likely never know? Well, if the answer is yes, you're not alone. It turns out that not everyone is wanting all eyes on them. Case in point, professional rich person Paris Hilton, who recently made headlines with her very unique scarf here. You see, this isn't just any piece of fashionable neckwear. This scarf is a weapon against unwanted photography. Dubbed the anti-paparazzi scarf, this thing was made to ruin any unwanted photos. How's it work? Well, these patterns here are made of the same reflective material that they use for most road signs. Road signs obviously need to be well-illuminated in the dark, so they're built to capture and reflect as much light as possible back to the drivers. Which is fantastic when you're talking about road safety, but absolutely terrible when you're talking about camera lenses. On the road, that means that when your headlights hit that stop sign, the sign's gonna glow like a light bulb. But translate that into a clothing item, and suddenly your camera lens sees this. A glowing scarf that obscures everything else in the frame. Most importantly, the wearer's face. In a day and age of overexposure, this sort of clothing provides a base level of protection against the onslaught of cameras looking to capture your face. But just how far can you push this idea? Can clothing compete against computers? Today, we're gonna be stepping away from all the flashy photos to find out whether or not your clothes can really be the key to protecting your identity, or whether the AI will truly outsmart even the smartest dressers. Now, spoiler alert, I'm not actually a newcomer to this world of camera-fooling couture. I actually own a piece of clothing that does exactly that, and I have for years. Yep, for the first time ever, good old DadPat here was actually ahead of a trend. And considering the topic of today's video, it felt like a good time to show off that piece. So unfortunately, we weren't able to get our hands on a lot of the anti-AI clothing that exists out right now, but there is one jacket in my entire collection that is supposed to befuddle all the AI that you can throw against it. I got this as a present a couple years ago when the channels crossed a milestone. And the way this is supposed to work is it's basically meant to fool and trick license plate readers into thinking they're actual license plates, but also they're not able to get clean reads off of them because they're ingesting so much data at once, and a lot of that data is unclean. The jacket is actually from a brand called Adversarial Fashion. They wanted to design clothes that could stick it to the man in their systems. The idea here is that real-world license plate readers would mistake part of the clothing's pattern for actual license plates, thereby crowding those databases with a bunch of junk information that ultimately makes their job much harder and you more tricky to track. But does it work? Honestly, I don't know. I always liked the pattern and the overall concept of the clothing, but never really took the time to test out the claims. At least, not until today. We downloaded a license plate scanning app to test it out. Don't worry, we did test it on a real license plate first to make sure that this thing was working. I brought in my old license plate. This is actually from my first ever car, M&M, which was a Mercury Milan, hence the name. It was given to me by my parents. It was a car that they had owned for like five years prior, and so I inherited it. It had a lot of miles on it. We drove cross-country in it. We moved out to California in it. It's gone now. Rest in peace, Mercury Milan. But even in death, M&M is still keeping the title of MVP by letting us test her old plate. After making sure that we were good to go with a few test scans... So it should be scanning right now, and it is. And it's capturing all of that info right there and uploading it into the cloud, right? We're going to store it in the cloud, and now we're going to follow this person and their data wherever they want. It was time to take the jacket for a ride. So, it's on. I don't know if it's scanning me yet since I can't see it, but I'm going to turn with my back to the camera and see how many of these it scans as potential license plates, and how clean the data is, and are we confusing it. Immediately, the scanner started picking up fake plates. I mean, just look at the number go. It's crazy. I honestly didn't expect it to get that many that quickly, but I also had a few other things that I wanted to test. I'm curious how that's going to play out with an actual license plate. So I have this, but I also have this. And as I stood there staring at the wall, the app kept scanning, and scanning, and scanning. It couldn't distinguish between the real authentic license plate and the print on my jacket. Even turning the plate upside down didn't matter. The scanner could read them all right side up, upside down, and sideways. What this tells me is that yes, the jacket actually works. It can indeed trick scanners into thinking that this print is just as legitimate as the real thing. But boy, do these security scanning cameras work fast. In seconds, the app had collected a ton of data. Sure, a bunch of it was junk data due to my jacket, but some of it was the actual plate. And while that's certainly cool and all, what good is that going to be really doing us for the long term? Well, cities and other government agencies use license plates to track people's whereabouts. Wherever you are in town, whether it be running errands or committing a felony to rob a bank, your license plate is being read by hundreds of cameras the entire time. Take the George Washington Bridge in New York City. Busiest bridge in the world, with a quarter million cars passing over it every day. The traffic on the George Washington is already bad enough. Now imagine trying to collect tolls from every single vehicle that passes over it. The city would grind to a halt. So instead, they use cameras. By taking pictures of every car's license plate that passes over, you can track every motorist who passes over the George Washington and bill them later. How? Well, every state maintains a database of all registered vehicles and who they belong to. Their names, birth dates, social security numbers, and sure, your address. And this is where my jacket's supposed to come in. My jacket is supposed to act as the spam mail of all this, crowding up the data set with so much junk that you just can't find the real information. And sure, it worked pretty well in our small-scale test, but whether or not this is going to be working on a large scale is still up in the air. My guess? Probably not that effective. You see, many of these surveillance systems have started to incorporate AI into how they do things. And AI can process lots of information real fast. For instance, one company recently featured on NPR Morning Edition was able to train the AI to identify a single yellow van from a high-definition aerial view of Milwaukee. In a matter of seconds, it was also able to locate every other yellow van visible across the entirety of the city. So my jackets junk data, yeah, it's adding extra information to the system, but not so much that it's actively slowing the process down. Then again, maybe it doesn't have to. You see, that yellow van example is really just a stand-in for your face. AI surveillance isn't just collecting pretty pictures of license plates and jaundiced vehicles, they also have data on your likeness from every possible angle. And when you're getting photographed 34 times a day without even thinking about it, suddenly you can see how quickly any company can track your whereabouts. So really, what we need here isn't a bunch of junk data, what we need is a more versatile version of Paris Hilton's scarf. Something that can blur our image or confuse camera lenses at any hour of the day, flash or no flash. And that is absolutely something that exists, which I'm gonna tell you about after I tell you about another way to protect yourself, our sponsor for today's episode, Incogni. When you're browsing online, whether it's shopping for new clothes or just checking out the latest updates from your favorite creators, your data, it's at risk. Even sites that you trust to keep your data safe can be hacked. Just this year alone, Twitter, I mean, X, had a data breach that exposed the data of over 200 million users, including people like me. This data could then be sold by data brokers to companies for big dollars. That's where Incogni comes in. By making an account, I was able to see who had my data. But then from there, I would never know how to start getting that data removed from all these various sites, which honestly is what makes Incogni so great. It would take years to do this on your own, getting into contact with each individual company, writing letters, hitting unsubscribes, all of that stuff. Incogni takes care of all of that instantly. And Incogni's dashboard shows me exactly who has my information and how many of those have been successfully removed. Within a week, I've seen my info taken down from 51 sites. Incogni saves me the hassle of having to deal with all the complicated legal back and forth of getting our personal information removed from people I don't want having it. I care a lot about safety, and making sure that me and my family's data doesn't fall into the wrong hands. I mean, being a known person on the internet means you never know who's looking for you. It's actually a huge fear of mine. So Incogni is doing me and every theorist out there a solid by making it easier to keep control of my information, keeping my personal data my personal data. And they're giving all you style theorists a special deal as well. When you go to incogni.com slash style theory and use the code styletheory at checkout, you get 60% off an annual plan. That is some huge savings for some hugely valuable security services that you're not going to want to miss. So go on over to incogni.com I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash style theory or just click the link in the top line of the description and use the code styletheory S-T-Y-L-E-T-H-E-O-R-Y to take control of your information today for an absolutely incredible price. Thanks again to Incogni for sponsoring this part of the episode. And now, let's continue talking about how we can use our clothing to take down the A.I. overlords. So let's rewind a minute here. A.I. integrated facial recognition surveillance cameras. Sounds a lot more like 1984 than 2023. Those surveillance cameras don't actually exist yet, right? Well, the short answer is yes, they absolutely do exist. But just like your eyes can be tricked, A.I. may have a similar weakness. Enter anti-A.I. clothing. Take a look at this. No, this is not one of those magic eye pictures from the late 90s. Or actually, that is kind of exactly what it is. The anti-A.I. clothing was created by a new startup, Capable. And the secret of how it works actually lies in those unique, colorful patterns. This is the first fashion collection that can protect the wearer's biometric data. Capable took a deep look at how facial recognition cameras operate and designed a series of patterns that would specifically trick the A.I. into thinking that you are not a person. According to the brand, by wearing one of their sweaters or pants, any camera trained to find faces in a crowd would instead think that the strange patterns on your shirt were some sort of weird dog or giraffe or zebra distracted away from your face so you stay anonymous. How's that work? Well, the cameras need to separate the people from everything else in the frame. Capable's design makes that process a lot harder. By analyzing how the A.I. distinguishes between different objects, Capable designed a fabric that was perfectly crafted to trick the A.I. into thinking the shirt was the thing it needed to be looking at instead of your face. This garment is protecting the wearer at 360 degrees. The person who's not wearing the manifesto collection is identified as a person. The other one is not. If you or I looked at this image, we'd say that this is very clearly a woman wearing a shirt with a vaguely dog-shaped pattern. However, to the A.I., the shirt is so distracting that it focuses completely on the dog in the shirt and ignores the very obvious human person. Everyone here in the room can look at the model, the one who's wearing the orange sweater, and we're all able to say, okay, that's a person, but the artificial intelligence cannot say so. The same way that Paris Hilton's scarf is so bright that the camera can't capture the face, or the way my jacket is transmitting junk data into the lens, the Capable design is so attractive to the A.I. that it doesn't even notice the person wearing it. Big Brother doesn't realize that it should be trying to figure out my identity, so there's nothing to see here. It's just me, your friendly neighborhood giraffe walking down to Kohl's. Nothing suspicious going on in this direction. So, how does a camera go from separating zebras from people to distinguishing between two separate people? Well, it all comes down to our good old friend, math. You see, every facial recognition program works a bit differently, but the basic premise is largely the same. Essentially, these programs will measure distances between different parts of your face, all to generate a series of measurements that should be unique to you, your face print. These face prints aren't so much photos of people's faces, they're no more than a series of numbers that represent your features. So then, when someone with those exact same measurements walks past one of these facial recognition cameras, the system identifies it as you. Those face prints can then be tied to biographical information about the person, from their name and age to their income and criminal record. If they're truly sophisticated, then they could even have a record of your interests and habits. You ever accidentally click on a link to a website only to then be constantly fed ads for that site until the end of time? Now, imagine that, but instead of following your browsing history, it's also following your real-life browsing history. You walk into a Starbucks to use the bathroom and all of a sudden you're getting an email for Venti deals. Keep in mind, the technology to make all of this happen, it already exists, and it's starting to roll out in various places across the country. Somewhere between a third to half of all countries are using some sort of AI facial recognition technology right now. So, with us being on the precipice of this AI revolution, should we all be going out and buying up these anti-AI clothing options? Ugh, no. You see, it's that time of the episode where MatPat unravels your dreams of futuristic fashion once again. For starters, good luck buying a whole wardrobe of wearable anti-AI clothing, considering what they're going for right now. Each piece of Capable's catalog is gonna set you back somewhere between $400 to $700, and sure, you might not be recognized by AI cameras, but you will be known by everyone around you as the guy who wears the same creepy nightmare dog sweater every day. Probably also doesn't help your case that you're always mumbling about the AI watching you all the time. That may feel like some main character energy, but as the kids say, that ain't it. But here's the real takeaway from all this. Even if you shell out some serious cash and deck out your entire wardrobe in these anti-AI patterns, it doesn't mean that it's gonna work 100% of the time. Capable even admits that its garments only correctly obscure the wearer around 60% to 90% of the time. Now, if you're thinking to yourself, eh, those sound like pretty good odds, remember that being able to be detected for even one second is enough to collect your data, which completely defeats the purpose of wearing these outfits for anything other than cool, techy fashion. That 10% to 40% failure rate might look good on paper, but remember how many images of license plates got taken on my jacket. In seconds, the lens had tried to capture me dozens of times, and more attempts made more frequently means that the AI is eventually gonna beat the probability. And while I'm sure that Capable will say that they're working every day to improve those odds, you know what else is improving? AI. AI can work faster at certain tasks than humans ever could. What might take months of designing and testing new clothing patterns could all be undone in seconds by these AI programs being trained to see through it all. That's not even considering what's probably the biggest flaw in Capable's design, the kind of flaw that renders the entire garment pretty much useless, and that's the AI itself. As I mentioned earlier, every AI algorithm measures faces in a slightly different way. The end result winds up being the same, a unique string of numbers representing each person, but what each AI chooses to measure on our faces is what separates one from the other. Capable has trained their designs on a program called YOLO. YOLO. You only live once. No, not that YOLO. Or, at least, not exactly. You see, this YOLO stands for You Only Look Once. And I can't stress this enough, YOLO is not a facial recognition program. I repeat, it is NOT a facial recognition program. It's designed to distinguish a person from a penguin, but it cannot tell the difference between two people. I don't know about you, but if I was a malevolent individual looking to set up surveillance to help me track specific individuals, I would probably want my AI to be able to tell the difference between an Amy and a Tom. So, really, what's being fooled here by this clothing is the least sophisticated of these super-intelligent designs. Not looking all that great for clothing taking down the computers. So, there you have it, folks. Another overlap of technology and clothing that your boy MatPat here has had to tear to shreds. But you know what? I'm excited to see what Capable and other brands like it do in the future. There's actually an anti-surveillance fashion event happening right now as we speak in Switzerland. Who knows what we'll see pop up over the next few years. Sure, I might be a skeptic now, but if the internet's taught me anything, it's to expect the unexpected. Especially as it applies to fashion. But, hey, that's just a theory. A style theory. Keep looking sharp. If you want to learn more about innovative fashion finds, click the box on the left to learn about how UV-activated clothing is a rip-off. Or if you prefer your science a bit more super, click the box to the right to learn about the secret behind Hulk's indestructible pants.
