Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy

SAND Lab at the Universityof Chicago has announcedFawkes, which is a BSD-licensed privacy-protection toolavailable on GitHub."At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images, and makes tiny,pixel-level changes to them that are invisible to the human eye, in aprocess we call image cloaking. You can then use these "cloaked" photos asyou normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends,printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you wouldany other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone triesto use these photos to build a facial recognition model, "cloaked" imageswill teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you looklike you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable, and will not causeerrors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you usingan unaltered image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public), and tries toidentify you, they will fail."