Fawkes

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We present a project to you Open source ¹ very interesting, perhaps not useful in our daily lives but certainly powerful and courageous. The name Fawkes derives from Guy Fakwes mask famous throughout the world especially thanks to the character of V and to the film V for Vendetta ².

Fawkes was created by SAND Lab from the University of Chicago. It is an algorithm and software that allows the insertion of a virtual mask within an image. We will not go into detail about this model and if you are interested in it, we always advise you to find out more on their site.

Fawkes

Basically thanks to Fawkes it is possible to put a mask invisible to the naked eye that makes identification by facial recognition models impossible. The images are really identical to the human eye but according to all tests carried out it is effective really to 100% against the most famous facial recognition models: Microsoft Azure Face API, Amazon Recognition And Face++.

The project Fawkes is led by two doctoral students from SAND Lab, Emily Wenger And Shawn Shan, with important contributions from Jiayun Zhang (current doctoral student at UC San Diego) e Huiying Li, also a doctoral student in the SAND Lab. The faculty advisors are the co-directors of the SAND Lab and the professors Ben Zhao And Heather Zheng.

Thanks to this software you can to poison the models trying to learn what you look like. So if you want to participate, simply download the software and upload your appropriately modified photos online.

Image Scrubber

While we're at it, let's also talk about another software Open source ³ very interesting. Image Scrubber it is in fact an online tool that will allow you to immediately eliminate the EXIF, or i photograph metadata. It will also help you blur images in just a few seconds.

It is software that can be very useful when you intend to post photographs depicting people, for example during demonstrations. In fact, there are countries in the world where demonstrating in the streets can be dangerous and can even lead to prison ⁴⁵. Thanks to software like Image Scrubber artificially manipulated photos of demonstrations can be published without it being possible to identify the people who participated.

One of the features of this program is that works completely offline. So if you don't want to use the site you can download the files and run it on any Browsers even by disconnecting from the internet.

We really liked the simplicity of using this tool and that's why we decided to talk about it.

1. source code on GitHub[↩]
2. Guy Fawkes mask[↩]
3. source code by Image Scrubber[↩]
4. China's new weapon of choice is your face[↩]
5. Hong Kong Protesters Are Worried About Facial Recognition Technology. But There Are Many Other Ways They're Being Watched[↩]

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