• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, March 4, 2015

If you’re like most people, you have absolutely no problem with our modern world’s ubiquitous surveillance technology, welcoming its lightly enwrapping tendrils as you would the gentle embrace of the sea as you succumb to your inevitable fate. But those oddballs who have a problem with robots spying on them can foil at least some of this pervasive monitoring, courtesy of online security company AVG, which has developed special glasses that frustrate facial recognition software.

The experimental glasses, presented by AVG at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, are equipped with LEDs that emit infrared light, otherwise invisible to ordinary human vision, which makes it impossible for digital cameras connected to facial recognition software to get a lock on your face. They basically provide a Star Trek-style “cloaking device” for your face, at least as far as automated facial recognition goes.

Although the glasses remain in the prototype phase, in theory they would allow someone wearing them to avoid being automatically tagged in photos by Facebook’s facial recognition technology. Use cases are not far to find -- including, say, any time you were somewhere that you weren’t supposed to be, and don’t want to be discovered when your Facebook-crazy friend posts photos of the event.

Last month Facebook introduced a new, improved version of its facial recognition tagging technology called Deep Face. 

Developed for Facebook by an Israeli company called face.com, Deep Face is supposedly able to recognize a human face in a new photo by comparing it with a previously uploaded photo with 97.25% accuracy.

DeepFace works by constructing a three-dimensional model of a face based on a photo, then “rotating” it so the software can compare it to other photos from a variety of angles. Facebook allows users who don’t want to be identified by the technology to opt out by adjusting their privacy settings. But those glasses might still come in handy for the rest of the panopticon.