Humans already started using powerful versions of facial recognition tools as a method for your computer to recognize them. People were fooled, so it’s not a big surprise that new attacks will trick facial recognition systems too.
The use of an individual’s private data by large companies has been a global issue of top concern ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018. The photos we share on social media were collected by groups to train algorithms and are sold commercially is a great threat to individual privacy. Researchers have come up with a smart way to help fight this problem.
Fawkes is an AI-powered tool that reconstructs your photos to trick facial recognition systems. Fawkes was developed by scientists at the University of Chicago’s Sand Lab and is called after the Fawkes masks n the V for Vendetta comic book and Fawkes movie.
It is a little complex software. Fawkes doesn’t make you invisible to the facial recognition system. Instead, it will make definite changes to your photos so that any algorithm scanning your images in the future identifies you as a different person. Simply saying using Fawkes tool on your photos is like adding an invisible mask.
This technique is called cloaking and it is meant to corrupt the facial recognition systems resources including Facial recognition firm Clear view AI or the databases of faces scraped from social media. Fawkes provides social media users with a layer of protection against such invasive practices. The cloaked face makes a completely different person when compared to an original image. This tool can cloak your image almost imperceptible and modifying them so they can’t be taken up by facial recognition software.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology had released a photo featuring digitally applied masks to demonstrate how the mask shape and color influenced the performance of facial recognition algorithms. Researchers noticed that even the popular facial-recognition systems have posted error rates as high as fifty percent on identifying masked faces. Fawkes is 100 percent successful against facial recognition services from top tech giant including Amazon Rekognition, Microsoft Azure Face, and Megvii Face++.
