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Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu

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Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#2

Post by gnabgib »

Also 7 days ago[1][2][3] but no upvote love so far. Which is curious given the (possibly short term, until these images join training corpus?) privacy benefits

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23845760 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23842016 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23837565

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#3

Post by keehun »

I was immediately was curious how it would protect against image compression and/or otherwise de-noising these protection pixel changes. Their paper does address this question, and for those that are interested:

    Even image compression cannot defeat our cloak.
    We use progressive JPEG [57], reportedly used
    by Facebook and Twitter, to compress the images
    in our dataset. The image quality, as standard
    by Independent JPEG Group [1], ranges from 5 to
    95 (lower value = higher compression). As shown
    in Figure 15, image compression decreases the
    protection success rate, but more significantly
    degrades normal classification accuracy.
I wonder how it works, but it works.

p.s. Mobile friendly copy-paste: "Even image compression cannot defeat our cloak. We use progressive JPEG [57], reportedly used by Facebook and Twitter, to compress the images in our dataset. The image quality, as standard by Independent JPEG Group [1], ranges from 5 to 95 (lower value = higher compression). As shown in Figure 15, image compression decreases the protection success rate, but more significantly degrades normal classification accuracy."

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#5

Post by Tarq0n »

While this seems to work against several current techniques, there's no guarantee it will work against all of them. It also offers no guarantees against future developments, and anything you put on the public internet is likely to be retained forever. Because of this I'd consider it an interesting proof of concept, but not something anyone should use as a privacy tool. You could consider it in cases where you're forced to provide a picture, for instance my public transport card requires one.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#8

Post by akersten »

Color me extremely skeptical. A low-pass filter will make short work of any "tiny, pixel-level" changes designed to thwart ML. After all, one of the most tell-tale identifiers (space between eyes/nose/mouth) is still plainly observable and unaltered in the "cloaked" image.

If a human's neural network can correctly correlate the before/after examples, so can a computer's. They might have found an issue with some modern implementations of facial recognition, sure. But it's a false sense of security to claim "when someone tries to identify you using an unaltered image of you [...] they will fail."

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#9

Post by Terretta »

Great concept, as long as the subject can avoid canonical image-to-name mappings such as airports (now scanning everyone), US’s REAL ID database, and the like.

That said, given that for most people the threat model is social or work rather than legal, something like this would be terrific to build into consumer insta-photo devices.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#10

Post by hyko »

Smart but not wise.

Certainly another tool in the privacy toolkit if you absolutely must surrender your likeness to someone else’s computer, but worth bearing in mind that this does not provide (and doesn’t purport to provide) the kind of privacy that strong encryption (or better yet, absent data) can provide.

Edited to add: it’s still damn cool.

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