Machine learning technique to help keep your personal data your own

You may not realise it, but without your consent the images you post on social media, including your profile, are harvested and used for training facial recognition systems driven by machine learning. With this data, over which you now have almost no control, it's easy for these systems to be used or misused to identify you and your friends perhaps, for example, from CCTV footage. But what if there was a way to protect your data while still using it freely so that your friends can still see your photos but AI systems are blocked from exploiting these same images? In our new research, we have shown that we can actually do this by using AI against itself to minimally adjust an image that makes it effectively'unlearnable' to AI. We have devised a machine learning-based technique that identifies and changes just enough pixels in an image to confuse AI, and turn it to an'unlearnable' image.