Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy
Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy
SAND Lab at the University
of Chicago has announced
Fawkes, which is a BSD-licensed privacy-protection tool
available on GitHub.
"At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images, and makes tiny,
pixel-level changes to them that are invisible to the human eye, in a
process we call image cloaking. You can then use these "cloaked" photos as
you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends,
printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would
any other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries
to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, "cloaked" images
will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look
like you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable, and will not cause
errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you using
an unaltered image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public), and tries to
identify you, they will fail.
"