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Fawkes

Product
Developers: University of Chicago
Date of the premiere of the system: 2020
Technology: Systems of video analytics

2020: Fawkes start - software for protection of photos against face recognition

On August 4, 2020 it became known of emergence of the Fawkes tool which is intended for protection of photos against face recognition. Founders of Fawkes hope that their development will allow to get rid of the Clearview tool which on the contrary collects pictures of people and creates of them huge databases for face recognition.

The Fawkes tool is called in honor of Guy Fox's mask which is the character of a protest and fight used by people worldwide. According to Hacker News, at the time of Fawkes detection 50 thousand times managed to download the tool. Founders of Fawkes are computer engineers from the Chicago university. This software is not intended only for users with the increased concern about the security. Further development of Fawkes service will allow it to become the powerful tool for fight against the systems of face recognition and to undermine the accuracy of identification of such developments as Clearview. This startup already managed to process over one billion pictures detected in Internet space and to create the tool which can indicate Facebook profile of the person which image is analyzed by the program.

Fawkes is the tool for protection of photos against face recognition

Fawkes is focused on change of the photo at the level of pixels. Such 'masking' is imperceptible for a naked eye, however the systems of face recognition will not be able correctly to process data any more. Within testing developers of the Chicago university managed with the help of Fawkes to deceive the systems of face recognition from Amazon, Microsoft and also the Chinese company Megvii.

Developers continue to be engaged in improvement of the Fawkes functions that eventually will allow the tool to win a victory over Clearview. It is expected that users will mask all photos published in social networks through Fawkes.

The Fawkes program is available to downloading on computers running Windows and macOS.[1]

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