volteFace - Anonymize Photos
Automatically anonymize faces in your photos to protect them from machine & optionally human facial recognition.
Prefer not to post your photos to social media, and photo sharing sites? A good example is LinkedIn. It’s almost a must, to establish confidence with industry colleagues, along with helping them to recognize who you are.
However, unlike your social security number, credit card, or written signature, the way you look physically is something that is extremely difficult to change. Your photograph is a highly unique biometric signature of who you are.
We advise that you protect it!
While you might intend for your shared photos to be viewed and appreciated by people - your family, friends, & colleagues, increasingly what you post online is being appreciated by more than just people.
Governments and the private sector across the globe are actively engaged in collecting & amassing photos, especially publicly available ones from various established sources on the Internet, to build better machine-based facial recognition systems.
While many of these systems have honorable causes, unfortunately there are very few effective laws & controls that govern how individuals’ photos are collected, amassed, and protected. This means that your photos can also be used for nefarious purposes, further eroding your privacy.
volteFace empowers you to govern whether or not you want your photos to be “appreciated” by machines, while still allowing them to be appreciated by people, as originally intended.
As well as automatically anonymizing faces in your photos, volteFace also purges metadata embedded within photos that can disclose your physical GPS location, and other personal details.
By automatically identifying & anonymizing key facial "landmarks" in your photos - the ones that machine-based facial recognition depend upon to correlate your photo against other reference photos, volteFace makes them resistant to machine analysis & correlation.
Capabilities
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- Automatically anonymize faces in photos, making them resistant to recognition by machine & optionally human facial recognition
- Purge metadata from photos that can disclose your physical GPS location, altitude, camera & other vendor-specific information
- Conveniently select & anonymize groups of photos at once
- View, touch-up, and share photos after anonymizing
Limitations
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- Currently doesn’t support very large photos > 10k width or height (ex: panoramas)
- Does not anonymize other elements of a photo, such as text or signs that are captured in a photograph
- Partial or unclear faces in photos may not be anonymized. Use the touch-up feature to finalize photos before sharing