Cap_able's Innovative Approach to Identity Privacy

Hello. Yeah, thank you very much. My name is Rachele. I’m Italian. And so I’m the CEO of Cap_able. And I’m also doing a PhD about textile for privacy, which is also the theme of my startup, Cap_able.

Yeah, so, Cap_able works with facial recognition. We want to be the Gore-Tex for identity protection. And everything started in 2019 when I was living in New York City. I have a background in fashion design. So I was working in New York as a fashion designer, and for the first time I heard of facial recognition technology. And at first I was a bit confused, and I got a bit scared. I didn’t know what that was.

And when I knew a bit more about the technology, I was really shocked about the fact that we don’t have physical protection to protect our biometric data from this technology. And so a friend of mine from Berkeley graduated in computer science, and we decided to just put together our expertise and create the idea of Cap_able. So a physical protection that protects biometric data. And so that’s how we started. Then of course, I developed the technology and then everything started actually as a fashion brand that you can still see actually on the first collection. You can still see it on the website.

So I would say for the fashion brand, it’s this avant-garde of people belonging to this cultural and technical avant-garde who wants to be a leader in raising awareness, who’s concerned about the direction that our world is taking. We’re living in this world of machines and it’s so exciting.

There’s a lot of technological development, but sometimes you just need to be aware of the misuse also of some technologies and surveillance state in which we are living in sometimes. And so that’s the target for the manifesto collection. But of course, like working on this more and more, it will be a problem of many, many, many, many people, I would say like all of us, if we want to opt out from the technology, from certain technologies, we don’t have a way to do it in the physical world, because if we are on the digital world, maybe we can say no to cookies, for instance, but in the physical world, it’s just much more complicated.

I would say, yeah, we are leading the space. Of course, there’s a lot of state of the art and artists or critical arts, critical designs and even technical tools, no? They’re there for people to either think about it or buy it and use it. But we are the first one who really put together the technological side and the design side in order to create this technological critical design product that we produce and there is this all this supply chain behind it and so we can actually have a product which is not only the final garment but it’s also all the textile that we are developing.

Yeah, so of course, I’m pretty sure we are the only brand who’s trying to protect biometric data, who’s trying to protect privacy. So we’re for sure, I mean, we have many brands who want to be sustainable. You can be sustainable in many ways. We are for sure, like we are already sustainable regarding all the impact on the environment, we try to source our materials in a certain way, all the certifications and stuff, but that’s for us, it’s just the basics and the base, and then we are just building on it, and the most important message for us is the privacy, and that makes us unique.

Yeah, absolutely. We are selling worldwide and we are building this community that it’s with people really from all over the world. And that’s the beauty of it because we, yeah, it’s, I mean, we are working with this message that it’s common to everyone in the world and pretty much everyone will feel it as a problem, like the fact of being surveilled and giving away our data.

I would say our best selling product is probably the ones called either the hoodie or the sweaters. And of course we want it to be really high quality. And it’s all made in Italy. Of course I’m Italian so it was easy for us to build this supply chain in Italy using the high quality, top quality materials. And I think it’s also nice that all of our garments are reversible, because at the end of the day, our main message is really to make people, make them critical again, make them think. And so do I want to give my data or do I want to obtain or opt out from this technology?

And so the garments are reversible. So if I’m wearing them on the side that it’s adversarial, then I am protecting my biometric data. But if I reverse it, if I flip it inside out, then the inside part, it’s still beautiful, but it’s not confusing the AI. And so, at that moment, I am giving away my data.

I think in the past year, the mentality of like, I mean, everyone is talking about AI, everyone is talking about this revolution, everyone is talking about data, not really everyone, but it’s like, the world is changing its sensibility on the topic. But when I first started, I mean, I met many, even friends, who were telling me, but what are you doing? Are you making garments to go rob the bank or for terrorists? And I was like, no. Also, I mean, our garments are so colourful. The collection is called Manifesto for something, no? Because we want to be really visible to the other people, but invisible to the AI. But so I would say at the beginning, that was the main challenge, for sure.

Just making people understand that our intention is good. We don’t want to be rebels, but we just want to bring value to society.

I for sure want to finish my PhD, that’s for sure. That it’s about it. And it also helped me a lot with all the ethical side and just entering also the scientific community about privacy and privacy tech. But in the future, as I was saying at the beginning, I really see our brand as the Gore-Tex of identity protection, in a world in which we will live more and more with machines.

And so we will live in a surveillance state. I will be able to identify who are the people around me by simply taking a picture of them with my phone. And so everyone who wants to be private and everyone who wants their kids to be private or who doesn’t want to show, I don’t know, that they have a pool or a car from the drones, you know, like so, they will need the textiles and the technology we’re developing. And that’s the big challenge.

I would say everything that, I mean, all the community, the growing community and everything was all organic. We didn’t pay for advertisement only when we did our Kickstarter campaign, but it was really, really like not much at all. And so I would say it’s just the best marketing for us. It’s just really being active in the community. We’re travelling a lot.

We’re going to many conferences, we’re meeting many people and it’s from the privacy point of view, but also for human rights, fundamental rights, or also like, since last month I was at MIT, I’m still working with, I’m a research affiliate there, so it’s also the tech community that’s really important for us and just talking with all these people, it’s just a word of mouth for sure, and also having these amazing journalists writing articles about us. Journalists who really, I mean, they’re either curious or they believe in our projects and so they just write articles and so the community gets bigger.

Well, I think, I mean, of course, as I said, I’m really specialised in fashion. And I would say that a fashion brand, any fashion brand really needs to have this added value. It cannot be about beauty and aesthetics anymore. It needs to add more and more and more because, the fashion industry, otherwise it’s about to, I mean, it’s not gonna last if we don’t bring this added value. And this is also what the new generations want. I mean, we want something with value. We want a good story, a solid story. And so that’s for sure my advice, to have something that ‘s aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also functional and everything is just super aligned.

Well, just that for me, this is really learning by doing and everything. I mean, I started, as I said, as a fashion designer, fashion specialist, and then going more and more into this brand and just explored all this computer science side. And I think, yeah, that’s good.

This is also what makes me just keep going every day, the fact that I’m a really curious person. And so this, of course, it’s amazing for that. But I think the most important asset that we have as Cap_able and as a startup, it’s really the people. I mentioned the community many times and we are building this community from all over the world.

And we all share this common goal that is to protect the most beautiful but also the most vulnerable part that we have, which is our identity, our face. And I think we all want to protect this human essence. And I think we are doing it pretty well. And we just have so much energy and just, so we just want to just keep doing it and yeah.

Thank you, thank you very much.