​Make your face unrecognizable

You need to use your photo on the Internet, but you don’t want to be found through some Google pictures?

Then use Fawkes – a program to change the photo so that the facial recognition algorithms do not recognize the person on it.

To confuse the algorithms, the program changes the image at the pixel level. However, there will be practically no visual difference to the eye.

The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes¹, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how unknown third parties can track them by building facial recognition models out of their publicly available photos. At a high level, Fawkes “poisons” models that try to learn what you look like, by putting hidden changes into your photos, and using them as Trojan horses to deliver that poison to any facial recognition models of you.

Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes 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 by humans or machines and will not cause errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you by presenting an unaltered, “uncloaked” image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public) to the model, the model will fail to recognize you.

The source code of the program is open. Installation is available on Windows, macOS and Linux.
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#anonymity