Privacy Campaign Airs Spooky Deepfake On Gas Pump Screens

Rather, it's what is expected to happen from viewing a creepy campaign about privacy issues being shown on screens at the 24,000 Gas Station TV (GSTV) locations across the country. The scene shows the friendly face of the TV anchor at the pump transforming into the villainous visage of a man with a sinisterly voiced warning about digital data collection. The stunt, which involved using deepfake technology to replace the face of GSTV host Maria Menounos, is part of a new online privacy campaign that also includes a hair-raising Zoom video experience putting viewers in the center of a horror movie-like plot via their webcam. The entire project is a belated follow-up to a 2011 viral stunt called "Take This Lollipop," a Facebook app that captivated a more innocent generation of social media user with videos of the same ominous character reciting data about each viewer collected through Facebook's data-sharing practices. Creators Jason Zada, a film director, and Jason Nickel, a developer, said they hoped to reprise the success of that effort and the awareness it brought to Facebook's data policies, but were waiting for the right cause.