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AVG privacy glasses
AVG

With cameras and face-detection software everywhere these days, what’s a privacy-loving citizen supposed to do? Anti-virus software maker AVG has a proposal: eyeglasses that thwart those technologies, thanks to infrared LEDs that are invisible to the human eye, but interfere with cameras’ ability to see your face. (Want to see a simple version of this in action? Press a button on your TV’s remote control while pointing it at your smartphone’s camera.)

Unfortunately, AVG’s privacy glasses, which the company is demoing at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, are merely a concept at this point; AVG says not to expect them for sale anytime soon. Instead, the company hopes to start a conversation about the pervasiveness of these types of privacy-eroding developments, and how technology can help combat them. Just as well, since asking everybody to don weird-looking glasses probably isn’t really a solution.

On the upside, at least AVG’s glasses are better looking than the pair developed by the National Institute of Informatics in Japan a couple years back. Those are specs that not even people miniaturized and stuck inside a computer could love.