Fawkes: Protect your photos from face recognition

Fawkes is a free, open source software that uses artificial intelligence to subtly modify your photos to trick face recognition software.

The notorious facial recognition is a serious threat to privacy. The idea that the photos you've been sharing online are being collected by for of algorithms, which in turn are sold commercially, is quite worrying. In theory anyone can buy these tools, take a picture of a stranger and find out who they are within seconds.

Even worse, a huge one could να ενοικιαζόταν ως παροχή υπηρεσιών και με την συνδρομή ενός γρήγορου ασύρματου GSM , like the 5G that is coming, to be able to see online the name of each person who passes by you.

Although we are still far from such an ominous situation, they have already started the cat and mouse game. One solution to facial recognition is a tool called Fawkes, created at the University of Chicago's Sand Lab. He was named Fawkes after the Guy Fawkes masks worn by the rebels in the film V for Vendetta.

The Fawkes software uses artificial intelligence to alter your photos, in a subtle and almost imperceptible way, to trick facial recognition systems.

See for example the following photo of Queen Elizabeth, with the left one being normal and the right one being "teased".

The way the software works is a bit complicated, and passing your photos through Fawkes doesn't make you invisible to facial recognition. Instead, the software makes subtle changes to your photos so that any algorithm that scans those images in the future will see you as a different person. Essentially, adding Fawkes to your photos is like adding an invisible one in your selfies.

Its makers call this process "cloaking" and rely on destroying points that face recognition systems read and rely on. They cite the example of face recognition company Clearview AI, which claims that has collected about three billion images of faces from sites like Facebook, the and Venmo, and which it uses to identify strangers. But according to the makers of Fawkes, if the photos you share online have been "hacked" through Fawkes, then the person in the database that the algorithm can recognize will not actually be you.

According to the University of Chicago team, the Fawkes are 100% successful against state-of-the-art face recognition services, such as Microsoft (Azure Face), Amazon (Recognition) and the Face ++ of the Chinese company Megvii.

The six-member team behind Fawkes, Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng and Ben Y. Zhao, published in early 2020 a task for its algorithm. Late last month Fawkes was also released as free software for windows and mac that anyone can download and use. To date it is said to have descended more than 100.000 times.

Fawkes is easy to use and takes a few minutes to process each image and the changes it makes are mostly imperceptible.

But is Fawkes the most general privacy solution? It is doubtful.
For a start, there is the problem of adoption. If you read this article and decide to use Fawkes to hide any photos you upload to social media in the future, you will definitely be in the minority. Face recognition is a concern because it is a trend aimed at the whole society and so the solution should be used by the whole society. If know-how protects the selfies of certain users, it simply creates inequality and discrimination.

Δεύτερον, πολλές που πωλούν αλγόριθμους αναγνώρισης προσώπου, δημιούργησαν τις βάσεις δεδομένων των προσώπων εδώ και πολύ καιρό και δεν μπορείτε να ανακτήσετε αναδρομικά αυτές τις πληροφορίες. Ο Διευθύνων Σύμβουλος της Clearview, Hoan Ton-That, είπε στους Times ότι “Υπάρχουν δισεκατομμύρια μη τροποποιημένες φωτογραφίες στο Διαδίκτυο, όλες σε διαφορετικά socail media”. Στην πράξη, ίσως είναι σχεδόν πολύ αργά για να τελειοποιηθεί μια τεχνολογία, όπως η Fawkes, και αυτή να αναπτυχθεί σε παγκόσμια κλίμακα.

Of course, contrary to the above claims, the team behind Fawkes disagrees. They note that although companies like Clearview claim to have billions of photos, that does not mean much, even when they are supposed to recognize hundreds of millions of users. Chances are, Clearview has only a very small number of publicly accessible photos. And if people upload more Fawkes photos in the future, sooner or later the amount of "teased" images will exceed normal.

The Fawkes team admits that in order for their software to make a difference, it needs to be released more widely. They have no plans to build a web application or mobile app, but hope that companies like Facebook will incorporate a technology similar to Fawkes into their platform in the future.

The integration of this technology would be in the interest of these companies, says Zhao. After all, companies like Facebook do not want people to stop sharing photos, and as long as face recognition companies are still able to collect the data they need from public images, the use of Fawkes technology is essential. And while the integration of this technology at the moment may have only a small effect, for current users, it could help future generations to register fearlessly on these platforms.

“Adoption by larger platforms, e.g. "Facebook or others could over time negatively affect Clearview, making their technology so inefficient that it will no longer be useful or economically viable as a service," says Zhao.

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Written by Dimitris

Dimitris hates on Mondays .....

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