A growing number of tools now let you stop facial recognition systems from training on your personal photos

Uploading personal photos to the internet can feel like letting go. Who else will have access to them, what will they do with them—and which machine-learning algorithms will they help train?

The company Clearview has already supplied US law enforcement agencies with a facial recognition tool trained on photos of millions of people scraped from the public web. But that was likely just the start. Anyone with basic coding skills can now develop facial recognition software, meaning there is more potential than ever to abuse the tech in everything from sexual harassment and racial discrimination to political oppression and religious persecution.

A number of AI researchers are pushing back and developing ways to make sure AIs can’t learn from personal data. Two of the latest are being presented this week at ICLR, a leading AI conference. Read More