In our own tests we found that Fawkes is sparse in its design but easy enough to apply. To date they say it’s been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
FACE RECOGNITION PHOTO SOFTWARE FOR MAC SOFTWARE
But late last month they also released Fawkes as free software for Windows and Macs that anyone can download and use.
Zhao - published a paper on the algorithm earlier this year. The group behind the work - Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Y. Photos of Queen Elizabeth II before (left) and after (right) being run through Fawkes cloaking software. “Once the corruption happens, you are continuously protected no matter where you go or are seen.” You’d hardly recognize her. “What we are doing is using the cloaked photo in essence like a Trojan Horse, to corrupt unauthorized models to learn the wrong thing about what makes you look like you and not someone else,” Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago who helped create the Fawkes software, told The Verge. But if the photos you share online have been run through Fawkes, say the researchers, then the face the algorithms know won’t actually be your own.Īccording to the team from the University of Chicago, Fawkes is 100 percent successful against state-of-the-art facial recognition services from Microsoft (Azure Face), Amazon (Rekognition), and Face++ by Chinese tech giant Megvii. Facial recognition firm Clearview AI, for example, claims to have collected some three billion images of faces from sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo, which it uses to identify strangers.
Scientists call this process “cloaking” and it’s intended to corrupt the resource facial recognition systems need to function: databases of faces scraped from social media. Essentially, running Fawkes on your photos is like adding an invisible mask to your selfies. Instead, the software makes subtle changes to your photos so that any algorithm scanning those images in future sees you as a different person altogether. Running your photos through Fawkes doesn’t make you invisible to facial recognition exactly.
The way the software works is a little complex. Running Fawkes on your photos is like adding an invisible mask to your selfies