At the University of Chicago, a tool called Fawkes was developed. This is an Artificial Intelligence created to subtly deceive facial recognition systems. This is because, currently, facial recognition is a tool that can be used in a harmful way, interfering with personal privacy.
The program works in a somewhat complex way. When you run your photos through Fawkes, he doesn’t make them invisible to facial recognition. However, the program makes smooth changes to the photo so that a recognition algorithm cannot analyze the photo effectively.
Essentially, Fawkes puts an invisible “mask” over your photos. However, the differences are almost imperceptible. This process of disguising selfies aims to corrupt the feature that facial recognition systems use: databases taken from social networks.
Facial recognition company Clearview AI, for example, says it has collected thousands of images from Facebook and YouTube, which they use to identify strangers and improve their artificial intelligence. However, if your photos have passed Fawkes, the recognition systems will not associate with your face.
Fawkes is already a free program for Windows and Mac
During the past month, Fawkes was published as a free program for Windows and Mac. So far, the program has had 100,000 downloads. If you want to try it, use the link below.
Try Fawkes for free
Still, Fawkes is not the ideal solution to fight the wave of facial recognition software. After all, how many people do you know who are willing to run all of their photos through a program on the PC before publishing them?
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