Zenni, an online glasses store, is offering a new coating for its lenses that the company says will protect people from facial recognition technology. Zenni calls it ID Guard and it works by adding a pink sheen to the surface of the glasses that reflects the infrared light used by some facial recognition cameras.
Do they work? Yes, technically, according to testing conducted by 404 Media. Zenni’s ID Guard glasses block infrared light. It’s impossible to open an iPhone with FaceID while wearing them and they black out the eyes of the wearer in photos taken with infrared cameras.
However, ID Guard glasses will not at all stop some of the most common forms of facial recognition that are easy to access and abuse. If someone takes a picture of your naked face with a normal camera in broad daylight while you’re wearing them, there’s a good chance they’ll still be able to put your face through a database and get a match.
For example, I took pictures of myself wearing the glasses in normal light and ran it through PimEyes, a site that lets anyone run facial recognition searches. It identified me in seconds, even with the glasses. One of the biggest dangers of facial recognition is not a corporation running an advanced camera with fancy sensors, it’s an angry Taylor Swift fan who doxes you using a regular picture of your face. Zenni is offering some protection against the former, but can’t help with the latter.
But the glasses do block infrared light and many of the cameras taking pictures of us as we go about our lives rely on that to scan our faces. When those cameras see me now, there will be black holes where my eyes should be and that’s given me a strange kind of peace of mind.
The modern world is covered in cameras that track your every movement. In New Orleans, a private network of cameras uses facial recognition tech to track people in real time and alert cops to the presence of undesirables. Last year tech billionaire and media mogul Larry Ellison pitched a vision of the future where cameras capture every moment of everyone’s life to make sure they’re “on their best behavior.”
Zenni’s director of digital innovation, Steven Lee, told 404 Media that the company wanted to offer customers something that helped them navigate this environment. “There’s devices out there that are scanning us, even without our permission and just tracking us,” he said. “So we asked ourselves: ‘could there possibly be a set of lenses that could do more than just protect our vision, maybe it could protect our identity as well.’”
As a side benefit of beating facial recognition, I noticed the ID Guard lenses were more comfortable for me to wear in sunlight than my normal glasses. I’m sensitive to sunlight and need to wear prescription sunglasses outdoors to prevent headaches and discomfort. The Zenni glasses cut down on a lot of that without me needing to wear shades.Lee explained that this was because the ID Guard blocks infrared light from the sun as well as cameras. This was one of the original purposes of the coating. “When we delved into that, we realized, not only could it protect your eyes from infrared…but it also had the additional benefit of protecting against a lot of devices out there…a lot of camera systems out there utilize infrared to detect different facial features and detect who you are,” he said.
There’s many different kinds of facial recognition technology. Some simply take a picture of a user's face and match it against a database, but those systems have a lot of problems. Sunglasses block the eyes and render one of the biggest datapoints for the system useless and low light pictures don’t work at all so many cameras taking pictures for facial recognition use infrared light to take a picture of a person’s face.
“What's happening when you're using these infrared cameras is it's creating a map that's basically transforming your face into a number of digital landmarks, numerically transforming that into a map that makes us each unique. And so they then use an algorithm to figure out who we are, basically,” Lee said.
But the pink sheen of ID Guard beats the infrared rays. “When infrared light is trying to shine into your eyes, it’s basically being reflected away so it can’t actually penetrate and we’re able to block up to 80 percent of the infrared rays,” Lee said. “When that is happening, those cameras become less effective. They’re not able to collect as much data on your face.”
To test ID Guard’s effectiveness I put them on my wife and sent her to battle the most complex facial recognition system available to consumers: an iPhone. Apple’s Face ID system is the most comprehensive kind of facial ID system normal people encounter everyday. An iPhone uses three different cameras to project a grid of infrared lights onto a person's face, flood the space in between with infrared light, and take a picture. These infrared lights make a 3D map of a user’s face and use it to unlock the phone.
My wife uses an iPhone for work with a FaceID system and when she was wearing Zenni’s ID Guard glasses, the phone would not open. Her iPhone rejected her in low light, darkness, and broad daylight if she was wearing the Zenni glasses. If she wore her own sunglasses, however, the phone opened immediately because the infrared lights of Apple Face ID made them clear and saw straight into her eyes.
The 2D infrared pictures taken in most public spaces running facial recognition systems are much less sophisticated than an iPhone. And there’s a way we can test those too: trail cameras. The cameras hunters and park rangers use to monitor the wilderness are often equipped with infrared lights that help them take pictures at night and in low light conditions. Using one to take a picture of my face while wearing the Zenni glasses should show us what I look like in public to facial recognition cameras used by retail businesses and the police.
Sure enough, the Zenni glasses with ID Guard stopped the camera from seeing my eyes when the infrared light was on. I sat for several photos in dark conditions while the camera captured photos of my face. The infrared went right through my normal sunglasses while the ID Guard glasses from Zenni stopped the light all together. The camera couldn’t get a clear shot of my eyes.
Zenni is not the first company to offer some form of anit-infrared coating that disrupts facial recognition tech, but it is the first to make it affordable while offering a variety of style choices. The company Reflectacles has been offering a variety of Wayfarer-style glasses with an anti-IR coating for a few years now. But Reflectacles style options are limited and have a powerful green-yellow tint. Zenni is also a major glasses retailer competing with other major retailers, it’s offering a variety of styles that match different aesthetics, and the pink sheen is way less noticeable than the green coating.
Zenni offers the ID Guard on most of its frames and the glasses have a subtle pink tint that’s obvious if you look directly at them, but I didn’t notice when I wore them. I used them to watch TV and went to the movies with them on and never noticed altered colors. “So with the pinkish hue, that was not by accident,” Lee said. “It was purposeful. We wanted to do something where we could actively show individuals that the lenses were actively working to protect their identity.”
Whether Zenni’s ID guard will actually protect people from facial recognition is less interesting than the fact that they exist at all. The state of our surveillance dystopia is such that a major glasses retailer is advertising anti-facial recognition features as a selling point as if it was normal.
