Worried About Privacy for Your Selfies? These Tools Can Help Spoof Facial Recognition AI

Ever wondered what happens to a selfie you upload on a social media site? Activists and researchers have long warned about data privacy and said that photographs uploaded on the Internet may be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) powered facial recognition tools. These AI-enabled tools (such as Clearview, AWS Rekognition, Microsoft Azure, and Face) could in turn be used by governments or other institutions to track people and even draw conclusions such as the subject's religious or political preferences. Researchers have come up with ways to dupe or spoof these AI tools from being able to recognise or even detect a selfie, using adversarial attacks – or a way to alter input data that causes a deep-learning model to make mistakes. Two of these methods were presented last week at the International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR), a leading AI conference that was held virtually.