How can you protect your privacy from face recognition systems?

German technology magazine c’t reported that biometric facial recognition systems work best when images are widely available through what is published on social media platforms.

And if the user wants to not supply and improve the monitoring systems in his own way, he can put some obstacles in the way of artificial intelligence.

The German magazine explained that this can be done by removing metadata, or what is known as "meta" data, from the pictures that are published on Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Although site data or facial recognition is an important matter when wanting to classify the user's travel photos or the actions of professional users, such data may not be passed on to advertising platforms or other service providers.

Programs to remove the metadata

There are many free programs that remove metadata from images in one go, such as IrfanView, or FastStone Image Viewer, and ImageOptim is also available on Mac devices.

Trinkwalder recommends editing images before they are published on social media platforms to better protect against biometric algorithms, through the use of effective anonymization tools, and such tools are available in almost all image editing programs, such as Microsoft Paint.

In order to perform anonymity, the face is highlighted by the selection frame, after which the ability to “distort pixels” or distort focus is selected with enough force. Set recommends that these tools be used in a very simple way so as not to distort the overall impression of the image.