This AI privacy tool protects your selfies

Each week, we spotlight a cool innovation recommended by some of the industry's top tech writers. This week's pick is a new AI privacy software.

A new software tool can "cloak" your selfies to trick facial recognition systems, said James Vincent at The Verge​. Scientists at the University of Chicago designed new AI privacy software to combat the proliferation of commercial facial recognition systems that scrape people's images off social media, such as Clearview AI.

Their tool — named Fawkes after the Guy Fawkes masks adopted by some hackers and ­revolutionaries — makes subtle enough changes to your photos "so that any algorithm scanning those images in the future sees you as a different person altogether." Some early trials did reveal flaws. A New York Times tester found that she looked "ghoulish," and her husband "appeared to have a black eye." But Fawkes says "the updated algorithm is much more subtle, and The Verge's own tests agree with this."

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