New AI Face Anonymization Model Protects Privacy

Was George Orwell right, is Big Brother watching us? Undoubtedly many are alarmed by the ever-increasing level of computer-driven surveillance, particularly involving facial recognition technologies. In the past few months, San Francisco and Oakland, California, and the US state of Massachusetts have all banned police from using facial recognition tech. Meanwhile, in Europe, The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces restrictive rules about privacy preservation in data processing. A team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recently proposed a new architecture that can anonymize faces in images automatically while the original data distribution remains uninterrupted.