Attach A Privacy Cloak To Your Profile Photo To Bypass Facial Recognition Surveillance
By: Debesh Choudhury
Tags: Digital Life, Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, Technology, Data Privacy

The digital privacy of the profile photos or any other photos that contain frontal face shots is under continuous privacy threats in the cybersphere. It is most likely that the well-known face recognition software project, such as Clearview.ai might have tracked all your online face photos.

Then what to do? How to protect the online privacy of your face profile photo?

Use a computer-generated fake face image instead of the real face photo

One of our fellow writers Thomas Smith posted a way out on Debugger that uses a third-party software tool called Anonymizer. I have come to know about this article from OneZero writer Dave Gershgorn’s commentary of November 26, 2020.

They report the basic technique of Anonymizer that essentially creates a mathematically identical face image that looks different from the actual face image.

People won’t be able to recognize the face because it is having a completely different look.

The Clearview.ai also wouldn’t be able to carry on matching with their massive face database.

This technique of “fake face image” technique is not good, because using fake images is unethical

If you use it as your profile photo, then your family members, relatives, friends, and colleagues won’t be able to recognize you.

If you ask me, I will say no to accept using “fake face images”. In my opinion, this doesn’t seem to be ethical to use a fake face image on my social media accounts.

How to protect the online privacy of profile photos? Add a privacy cloak on your profile photos

AI-powered software can resist the privacy threat by foiling facial recognition altogether

Machine learning tools are convenient for the automatic profiling of people’s photos in cyberspace. A computer vision research portal called clearview.ai has demonstrated how easy it is to monitor and track face images over the Internet. This has been detailed in my post of Oct 20, 2020.

How can AI help to overcome unauthorized third parties building facial recognition models that can recognize us in public? A group of researchers of the SAND Lab at the University of Chicago has developed an AI software tool named Fawkes to foil AI facial recognition models operating on facial features.

How can AI help to overcome unauthorized third parties building facial recognition models that can recognize us in public? A group of researchers of the SAND Lab at the University of Chicago has developed an AI software tool named Fawkes to foil AI facial recognition models operating on facial features.

People will be able to recognize the face because the face profile images will have the same look even after adding the privacy cloak

But the Clearview.ai wouldn’t be able to carry on matching with their massive face database.

Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models (USENIX Security 2020)

How can Fawkes software resist facial recognition models?

The open-source software tool Fawkes can run locally on our computers and offers us the power to limit how our own face images can be used to track them. Fawkes makes minute pixel-level changes in the feature space of the face images which are not easily visible/detectable by naked human eyes or machines. The research group calls this technique an image “cloaking.” We can then use these “cloaked” face photos to share on social media, send to friends, print, and display them on digital devices.

“Cloaked” face photos can’t be recognized and tracked as our own selves by face recognition software

If someone tries to use these “cloaked” face images to build a facial recognition model, the “cloaked” images would be modeled as a very distorted version. Now, if someone tries to identify us by presenting an un-altered or un-“cloaked” version of the face images, the model would fail to recognize us.

Would you like to protect your profile photos with a privacy cloak? Then download and try Fawkes

Please feel free to visit the webpage of Fawkes software at the SAND Lab, read the research article, view the presentation, and download the software. I have used Fawkes to “cloak” my profile photos. You may also try to “cloak” your profile photos and protect them from tracking for facial recognition.

I have downloaded the open-source software of Fawkes and run the program on a Debian GNU/Linux computer to privacy cloak my profile photo. All my social media accounts now have my profile photo privacy protected by Fawkes.

Don’t upload your personal photos on social media without a privacy shield. It may take additional steps to add a software-assisted privacy cloak. But it would be worth to consider safeguarding your profile photos.

Reference:

Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models.

Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Y. Zhao. In Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium 2020.