Questions, answered plainly.
What Personal Biometric Privacy means, what we are building, what sits outside our scope, and what our products can and cannot promise.
The category
What is Personal Biometric Privacy?
Personal Biometric Privacy is the ability for an individual to control when their face, voice, or other biometric identifiers can be read by a consumer device: smart glasses, wearable cameras, ambient sensors. It does not apply to government or law enforcement systems, which sit outside CloakDots' scope by design.
CloakDots is building the products, technologies and intellectual property that define this as its own category. See it in full on our definitions page.
What does Consumer Privacy Engineering refer to?
Consumer Privacy Engineering is the discipline CloakDots practises to build Personal Biometric Privacy: engineering physical materials, wearable devices and digital tools that give individuals agency over when their biometric identity is captured by consumer AI devices, rather than relying on policy or platform cooperation alone.
It is how we turn the belief that privacy should be a choice into something you can actually hold. See it in full on our definitions page.
What we build
What is CloakDots building, and how do the parts differ?
CloakDots is developing across three areas, each addressing a different part of the problem:
- Detect — digital tools that tell you when an AI-enabled device is nearby, so you know when you are in a capture-capable environment.
- Protect — wearable technology that interferes with the depth-sensing systems many devices rely on for biometric capture.
- Disrupt — material and physical technologies that interfere with visible-spectrum facial recognition at the point of capture.
Together they cover awareness, active interference and passive interference.
How is this different from a mask or face covering?
A mask covers your whole face and is unmistakably a mask, which is impractical for daily life and in some places legally restricted in its own right. CloakDots products are worn at specific points on the face or body, designed to be low-visibility and socially unremarkable, and do not require you to hide your face at all.
You are still recognisable to the people around you, just harder for a camera to reliably read and match. It is a different approach to a different problem: a mask hides that you are there, while CloakDots interferes with a machine's ability to turn your face into a data point.
What to expect
Does CloakDots work against government ID checks, airport security, or border control?
No. CloakDots is built for consumer devices only: smart glasses, wearable cameras and ambient sensors in everyday social environments. It is not designed or intended for evading legal surveillance, government identification systems, airport security, border control, or any legally mandated biometric process, and using it for that purpose falls outside what we support.
If a stranger's smart glasses can identify you in a social space, for example a coffee shop, that is the problem we exist to solve. Not government-grade infrastructure, which sits under an entirely different legal framework.
Is any of my data collected when I use a CloakDots product?
No personal or biometric data is collected by our wearable or material products. Both work without collecting, storing, or transmitting anything about you.
The only information CloakDots holds directly is what you choose to give us, such as an email address if you sign up for updates. Per our Privacy Policy, we do not sell it, share it, or use tracking pixels or behavioural analytics.
Does this stop me from being recognised by everyone, in every condition?
No, and we will not tell you it does. CloakDots products are designed to reduce the reliability of biometric capture, not eliminate it. Effectiveness depends on lighting, angle, distance and the specific system involved.
No product on the market today can promise total protection in every condition, and anything that claims otherwise is not being straight with you. What CloakDots aims to give you is a real, physical way to reduce your biometric readability in the environments where it matters most.
Working with us
Are you hiring engineers and other technical people?
Not yet formally, but we are growing, and engineering is where we are growing first. Our next development phase will need hardware and embedded systems engineers, full-stack engineers, materials scientists, computer vision specialists, and people across other technical disciplines we have not even named yet, because we are building a category that does not have an existing playbook.
If that is the kind of problem you want to work on, we would like to hear from you now rather than after a role is posted. Tell us what you work on and why this problem interests you, via our contact page.
I'm an investor, researcher, or working in this space. How do I get in touch?
We are open to conversations about collaboration, research partnerships and investment. If you are working in biometric privacy, consumer hardware or AI safety, reach out and tell us what you are working on, via our contact page.