When Zayn Malik officially announced his departure from One Direction yesterday (Mar. 25), sh-t hit the fan. Directioners freaked out, and #AlwaysInOurHeartsZaynMalik has been trending ever since.

"I am leaving because I want to be a normal 22-year-old who is able to relax and have some private time out of the spotlight," Malik said in a statement.

Online security company AVG has an accessory that could help with that -- a simple pair of glasses that thwart facial recognition technologies.

These glasses, developed by the Innovation Lab at AVG, use a combination of infrared light and retro-reflective materials to fool facial recognition software. When you're wearing them, computers won't automatically recognize your face.

"You’d still be able to see there’s somebody [in the picture] ... It’s not designed to make you completely invisible," Tony Anscombe, AVG’s Senior Security Evangelist, clarified to MTV News. He has almost 20 years of experience handling online security and privacy concerns. "What it’s designed to do is break the facial recognition system."

For you, this means Facebook won't automatically tag you making a weird face in the background of your BFF's or even a stranger's photos. If an unsolicited image of you somehow ends up online -- for example, on Google Street View -- companies won't be able to use facial recognition to connect your face with your private Instagram pics or other online data.

"Imagine going to a party and you’re not meant to be there," Anscombe explained. "And suddenly you’re tagged accidentally in the background of somebody else’s picture, and of course your parents might find out you were there because of it."

For superstars like Zayn, Invisibility Glasses have even bigger implications beyond just social media. Anscombe told us that without facial recognition, it'll be harder for people to track down celebs in real life by using online tags and virtual location info. And when paparazzi sneak in unwanted snaps, those photos will come out distorted and unusable thanks to the glasses' light reflective properties. It seems like this latest gadget could really help Zayn -- or any celeb, really -- get the privacy they're looking for.

Of course, technology like this could also be misused in the wrong hands. Facial recognition can help cops find criminals, and wearing Invisibility Glasses would make it far easier for the bad guys to get away. But right now, the glasses are just a prototype meant to demonstrate AVG's technology. They won't be sold publicly unless someone -- likely a separate company, Anscombe said -- takes AVG's software and turns it into a real product you can buy in stores or online.

Anscombe speculated that if that happens, "You would see certain instances when regulation would make you take the glasses off ... for example, when you're going through TSA in airports."

If Invisibility Glasses are ever brought to market, they'll probably look more like normal glasses do. The current prototype looks "slightly out of place," according to Anscombe. They do exactly what they're supposed to do, though -- prevent facial recognition from registering your face.

The technology behind the glasses works in two ways. When someone takes a photo of you, the camera sensor detects the glasses' strategically placed infrared lights, which prevent facial recognition. On top of that, the retro-reflective coating on the glasses' frame reflects the light from the camera's flash directly back into the camera's sensor.

"When the camera’s flash goes off, the light is reflected back at the camera’s sensor and the sensor picks that up [and then] almost everything gets blurred ... The face gets distorted," Anscombe explained.

But the technology isn't foolproof. If a camera has a strong infrared filter and if flash isn't used, the photo will come out much clearer and facial recognition technologies will be able to read it.

Still, it's better than nothing. And we already know Zayn looks damn fine in glasses.