Tool named for a mask may help thwart facial recognition
In recent years, companies have been prowling the web for public photos associated with people’s names that they can use to build enormous databases of faces and improve their facial-recognition systems, adding to a growing sense that personal privacy is being lost, bit by digital bit.
Clearview AI, for example, scraped billions of online photos to build a tool for police that could lead them from a face to a Facebook account, revealing a person’s identity.
Now researchers are trying to foil those systems. A team of computer engineers at the University of Chicago has developed a tool that disguises photos with pixel-level changes that confuse facial recognition systems.
Named Fawkes in honor of the Guy Fawkes mask favored by protesters worldwide, the software was made available to developers on the researchers’ website last month. After being discovered by Hacker News, it has been downloaded more than 50,000 times. The researchers are working on a free app version for noncoders.
The software is not intended to be a one-off tool for privacy-loving individuals. If deployed across millions of images, it would be a broadside against facial recognition systems.
“Our goal is to make Clearview go away,” said Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.
Fawkes converts an image — or “cloaks” it, in the researchers’ parlance — by subtly altering some of the features that facial recognition systems depend on when they construct a person’s face print.
To test the tool, I asked the team to cloak some images of my family and me. I then uploaded the originals and the cloaked images to Facebook to see if they fooled the social network’s facial recognition system. It worked: Facebook tagged me in the original photo but did not recognize me in the cloaked version.
But the changes to the photos were noticeable to the naked eye. In the altered images, I looked ghoulish, my 3-year-old daughter sprouted what looked like facial hair, and my husband appeared to have a black eye.
The researchers had a few explanations for this.
One is that the software is designed to match you with the face template of someone who looks as much unlike you as possible, pulling from a database of celebrity faces. That usually ends up being a person of the opposite sex, which leads to obvious problems.
“Women get mustaches, and guys get extra eyelashes or eye shadow,” Zhao said. He is enthusiastic about what he calls “privacy armor” and previously helped design a bracelet that stops smart speakers from overhearing conversations.
The team says it plans to tweak the software so that it will no longer subtly change the sex of users.
But Clearview’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, ran a version of my Facebook experiment on the Clearview app and said the technology did not interfere with his system. In fact, he said his company could use images cloaked by Fawkes to improve its ability to make sense of altered images.