Stump facial recognition technology

BIOMETRIC facial recognition software only get better as they process more and more images. For the greedy algorithms, social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are the equivalent of a buffet.

But if you don’t want surveillance systems feeding off your images, there are ways to make it harder for them to access and process your photographic material, according to the German industry magazine c’t.

The most basic and important step is to remove the metadata from photos that are uploaded to social media platforms.

While it may be useful for you to include information about the location, date and what’s in each picture, it doesn’t need to be passed on to the platforms and their advertising customers or service providers.

Free image viewers, such as Irfanview or Faststone, as well as Windows Explorer, can clean up several files at once. If you have a Mac, the Imageoptim tool offers the same capability as well.

For better protection against biometric algorithms, photos can also be further processed before uploading. Blurring or pixelating are effective filters to anonymise an image and can be found in almost every image processing programme, for example in Microsoft Paint.

Pick the filter and then put the selection frame around the face you want to make anonymous. And don’t be too restrained – often the filter is used with too light a hand to avoid ruining the quality. –