Fawkes- Protect your Facial Identity
Over the last years, facial recognition software has become increasingly ubiquitous and the discussions around the ethics of this kind of software can be heard daily. For example, it was viral news recently that the Chinese government was using this technology to identify and track people of certain ethnicity. In fact, it is not just the Chinese government that are taking advantage of this novel technology; the same thing is happening in Germany, India and other countries on top of private companies such as Facebook that are profiling your facial identity.
Therefore, it is important for everyday people to protect their facial identity. One way to do so is to use Fawkes, a software developed by the University of Chicago, to mask your face from being identified by facial recognition software. To human eyes, the masked image looks the same, but it prevents the image from being profiled by algorithm. Link to this software is available here: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/#code
However, although it makes it much more difficult for the algorithm to process a Fawkes-masked image, it is possible for facial recognition algorithms to train to bypass the mask. In fact, Microsoft Azure Facial Recognition platform has successfully lowered the efficacy of the Fawkes mask: https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/fawkes/.
Fawkes has since updated the algorithm to secure itself against Microsoft. This illustrates an important point in this field: a battle against machines is a perpetual one but if we stay vigilant, we can always be a step ahead.
