Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here's a way to Fawkes them right up:
Researchers at the University of Chicago's Sand Lab have developed a technique for tweaking photos of people so that they sabotage facial-recognition systems.
The project, named Fawkes in reference to the mask in the V for Vendetta graphic novel and film depicting 16th century failed assassin Guy Fawkes, is described in a paper scheduled for presentation in August at the USENIX Security Symposium 2020.
[...] "Our distortion or 'cloaking' algorithm takes the user's photos and computes minimal perturbations that shift them significantly in the feature space of a facial recognition model (using real or synthetic images of a third party as a landmark)," the researchers explain in their paper. "Any facial recognition model trained using these images of the user learns an altered set of 'features' of what makes them look like them."
The boffins claim their pixel scrambling scheme provides greater than 95 per cent protection, regardless of whether facial recognition systems get trained via transfer learning or from scratch. They also say it provides about 80 per cent protection when clean, "uncloaked" images leak and get added to the training mix alongside altered snapshots.
They claim 100 per cent success at avoiding facial recognition matches using Microsoft's Azure Face API, Amazon Rekognition, and Face++. Their tests involve cloaking a set of face photos and providing them as training data, then running uncloaked test images of the same person against the mistrained model.
- Research paper (pdf)
- GitHub page (Python)
- Project page (unencrypted, heh)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Zinnia Zirconium on Friday July 24 2020, @03:09AM
Let's Encrypt is the only encrypt and UChicago is not allowed to Let's Encrypt, heh.
Haha!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @03:13AM (1 child)
And yet the deep state of the tighty-righties wants to ban the niqab, which is surely the best defence unless the spooks are Superman and have x-ray vision.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Zinnia Zirconium on Friday July 24 2020, @04:02AM
No because the way everybody except me wears a face mask is around the neck leaving the whole face exposed. Neckmaskers gotta leave the breathing holes uncovered. Neckmaskers gotta spread that virus.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @03:46AM
"Remember, remember, the 5th of August, the Border Patrol treason and plot.
I no of no reason that the 5th of August should ever be forgot."'
Defund, and abolish, and obliterate, Bush's authoritarian Department of Republican Security! Time to go, DHS! These bastards are no Americans!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday July 24 2020, @02:50PM (2 children)
If you're worried pictures of your ugly mush might be hoovered by Big Data, don't put pictures of your ugly mush on the internet.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday July 24 2020, @03:47PM (1 child)
Not feasible, for your ugly mush not to be put on the internet in some way or fashion. You're not going to avoid every possible avenue for your face to end up being scanned in some way or fashion by a facial recognition system. You know, like how you have friends, relatives, co-workers, etc. who like to take pictures and post them on social media. Your job might even require your face to be posted on their website. You would have to make an extraordinary effort for your face not to end up in some sort of facial recognition database.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @08:26PM