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Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu

21–30 of 122 posts

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#22
post #18

This is awesome and really promising. But the fundamental fact about machine learning is its supposed to approximate/model any scenario so the basic premise of ML would defeat this isn't it? Its a matter of time before someone creates a face recognition model to defeat this.

In theory, yes, you can feed these new distorted images into a new model and defeat the cloaking.

In practice, building new training sets is much more expensive than slightly changing the cloaking algorithm.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#23

"when someone tries to identify you using an unaltered image of you [...] they will fail." I wonder how this holds up when someone takes a photo of that 'protected image'. I can imagine that if these miniscule pixel-scaled changes aren't visible to the naked eye, my crappy 6 megapixel camera will overlook it as well. If I then proceed to feed that image into my image recognition algorithm, is it still protected?

They go over the effects of compression - which they say only degrades the protection - but at the same time also degrades the identification accuracy of the AI model.

So if your crappy 6 megapixel camera cannot take a clear shot of the cloaked pixels - or effectively applying a blur filter - would also affect the AI detection.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#24
post #22
post #18

This is awesome and really promising. But the fundamental fact about machine learning is its supposed to approximate/model any scenario so the basic premise of ML would defeat this isn't it? Its a matter of time before someone creates a face recognition model to defeat this.

In theory, yes, you can feed these new distorted images into a new model and defeat the cloaking. In practice, building new training sets is much more expensive than slightly changing the cloaking algorithm.

That is awesome. I need to read the paper. Really promising. Are you the author btw?

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#25

This is tested on existing models/Face Recognition API which means locked pre-trained models. So, They might have learned way to add pixels such that model outputs very different embedding. This is know issue in deep learning [0][1][2]. I believe, Model trained on cloaked images would defeat its purpose and make this technique useless. [0] Su, Jiawei, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas, and Kouichi Sakurai. "One pixel attack…

This should be somewhat mitigated if you keep using different cloaking images, no?

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#26
This might work today, but it won’t work tomorrow.

This is just one side of a GAN, on the next iteration, it will be defeated.

Bottom line is that if a human can recognize, then it is possible for a machine as well.

Also, given that the big networks can just keep throwing more resources at it (I.e. GPT-3), it’s just a matter of increasing the network size to improve feature redundancy.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#27
post #3

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…

How about a 1px Gaussian blur? Haven't read the paper but I had the same thought. Seems way too tenuous.

Re: Fawkes: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

#30
Once this technique gets enough attention, a detector for it will be built. Even if the face cannot be recognized, a profile with such picture may be flagged for more scrutiny. This reminds me of using TOR that hides what you visit, and yet likely puts you into a watchlist for surveillance.

I think that a simpler and more robust strategy to achieve good privacy is avoid posting personal information online and social media altogether.

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