If you are on social media, photos of your face may be everywhere on the Internet. But some unscrupulous technology companies (e.g. Clearview AI) may have pulled these photos without your knowledge or permission to build a facial recognition model to connect your face with your online identity.
Some people are resigned to the fact that they have already lost the battle for their privacy because their faces are already out in the “wild”. They believe it is too late to do anything about it now because companies like Clearview AI may have already identified them.
If you are one of these people, you will want to be informed that actually, there is something you can do to fight back and reclaim your privacy. You can screw up the existing facial recognition models that have already built a facial profile of your face.
So, how do you do that?
SAND Lab at the University of Chicago has released a software tool called “Fawkes” to defeat facial recognition technology. You can download it here. As always, whenever you experiment with new and unproven software, please take precautions as mentioned in my book (e.g. using a sandbox, virtual machine or a separate computer in an isolated network).
I will leave you to work out how to install and run Fawkes as I do not want to repeat the information here.
Basically, this is how Fawkes works:
- You give it an image file of a photo with your face on it.
by redneck-engineer 
