45their bucket of KFC with their face,” he says about Apple
Pay on the new iPhone with Face ID. “Infrared is going to be
everywhere, brother.” He sent me two pairs of Reflectacles,
glasses with clear lenses and shiny frames that bounce back
enough light to blind both video cameras and infrared scan-
ners. When I put mine on, my iPhone X can’t recognize me,
just as it can’t when my eyes are shut. Urban’s forthcoming
invention, IRpair, uses the lenses to block rather than just
reflect the infrared beams necessary for facial recognition,
partly because Urban worries that we’re going to be so bom-
barded by infrared rays they might hurt our eyes.
But Mycroft reminded me, again, mostly by listening to me
rant and making that encouraging thinking face, that before
I meet Justine, I’ll have to silence the narc in my pocket. For
$9, I buy a faraday bag from a Chinese company to slip over
my phone. The black cloth pouch has a silver metal lining
that silences all signals to and from my phone. It’s more spy-
like, if more difficult, than just turning it off. For $1,600, I
could have put my phone and wallet (my credit cards with
chips have RFID readers that can be hacked) in a stylish Anti-
Surveillance Coat made by Project Kovr in the Netherlands.
“Clothing has always been a way to protect ourselves from
cold and protect our identities and our body. I wanted to use
clothing to protect us from the new environment of our infor-
mation sphere,” says Project Kovr’s co-founder Leon Baauw,
whose main gig is project manager at a privacy company. He
got the idea when his phone started giving him advice on
Fridays about when to leave for a bar he often went to after
work. “I don’t like how we have become the product,” he says.
He loves projects like the 2017 London pop-up shop called the
Data Dollar Store, where you could get a T-shirt by a street art-
ist in exchange for handing your phone to a clerk who would
display the last three photos in your camera roll on two big
screens in the shop. (This isn’t so different from the coffee
bar near Brown that dispenses free coffee in exchange for stu-
dents’ phone numbers, emails, and majors.) Project Kovr runs
a similar workshop at schools, in which it assigns some kids to
stalk another child from a distance so they can create a data
profile and tailor an ad campaign for the stalkee. Baauw has
also been planning a project in which he chisels a statue of
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg as a Roman
god. “He’s the Zeus of our time,” he says.
Wearing my Reflectacles and carrying my faraday bag, I
entered the 7-Eleven. Immediately to my right, long before I
reached the Slurpee machine or the checkout counter, I saw
Justine. She was a beautiful wall of shiny orange lockers with
a smile in the middle. My plan was working out perfectly until
I saw that the only way to open Justine was to show her my
phone. She needed to scan the bar code she emailed to C.G.
Roxane. I could have gone home and printed it out and come
back, but I was lazy. So I pulled my phone from its faraday
bag and quickly brought up the email. A door on the top
row smoothly swung open, and I took the package contain-
ing my privacy screen. But I knew I’d failed. In those few sec-
onds, Silicon Valley had all that it needed. Which I confirmed
later by going to google.com/maps/timeline and seeing the
7-Eleven location listed there along with almost everywhere
else I’d been in the last seven years.Within three weeks, I got tired of being careful. My faraday bag
is somewhere in the back of my car, because I like to use my
phone for GPS and playing podcasts. I stopped wearing my
Reflectacles in public. I haven’t scrubbed my old tweets away
with Jumbo in a while. I use my Visa to buy stuff from Amazon,
which it delivers to my house. I plugged Alexa back in. Daniel
Gillmor of the American Civil Liberties Union wasn’t surprised.
“I don’t think the fix to privacy is something that can be done
by an individual alone, in the same way I can’t solve the pollu-
tion problem by recycling on my own,” he says.
Until people demand a law that makes privacy the
default, I’m going to try to remember, each time I click on
something, that free things aren’t free. That when I send an
email or a text outside of Signal or MySudo, I should expect
those messages to one day be seen. And that if I ever really
need privacy, I should feel a little badly about what is going
to happen to Leo Selvaggio. <BW>Bloomberg Businessweek TECHLASH August 12, 2019
▼ Reflectacles Ghost spectacles, $164 ▼▼ Wisdompro RFID-blocking faraday bag, $9