Cory Doctorow’s sunglasses are seemingly ordinary. But they are far from it when seen on security footage, where his face is transformed into a glowing white orb.

At his local credit union, bemused tellers spot the curious sight on nearby monitors and sometimes ask, “What’s going on with your head?” said Doctorow, chuckling.

The frames of his sunglasses, from Chicago-based eyewear line Reflectacles, are made of a material that reflects the infrared light found in surveillance cameras and represents a fringe movement of privacy advocates experimenting with clothes, ornate makeup and accessories as a defense against some surveillance technologies. //

The motivation to seek out antidotes to an over-powerful force has political and symbolic significance for Doctorow, an L.A.-based science-fiction author and privacy advocate. His father’s family fled the Soviet Union, which used surveillance to control the masses.

“We are entirely too sanguine about the idea that surveillance technologies will be built by people we agree with for goals we are happy to support,” he said. “For this technology to be developed and for there to be no countermeasures is a road map to tyranny.” //

The lenses of normal sunglasses become clear under any form of infrared light, but the special wavelength absorbers baked into Urban’s glasses soak up the light and turn them black.

Reflectacles’ absorbent quality makes them effective at blocking Face ID on the newest iPhones. While Urban said the glasses aren’t designed to evade facial recognition that doesn’t use infrared light, they will lessen the chance of a positive match in such systems. //

L.A.-based cybersecurity analyst Kate Rose created her own fashion line called Adversarial Fashion to obfuscate automatic license-plate readers. A clothes maker on the side, she imprinted stock images of out-of-use and fake license plates onto fabric to create shirts and dresses. When the wearers walk past the AI systems at traffic stops, the machines read the images on the clothes as plates, in turn feeding junk data into the technology.