a few days ago i read an article about this relatively new piece of software called Fawkes (re: "The Guy Fawkes mask, a la V for Vendetta ") developed by some grad students at The SAND Lab at University of Chicago and thought it was interesting. within the past six months or so i had read a related article about how AI researchers were scraping social media and other sites like flickr (or buying pre-scraped databases of same) for personal photos that would be used to train facial recognition algorithms. i did my best to wipe most of my stuff when i bugged out of facebook a few years back, but of course most of how successful that was or was not depends on when (i would imagine from the beginning) the scraping started.
the aim of Fawkes is to obscure or alter photos in such a way that they “will teach the [facial recognition] model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you”. originally i hesitated posting about this since the article i read only mentioned Fawkes being released for windows and mac, but there is also a linux binary available for download linked on the page at bottom in addition to installation and usage instructions in the readme on their github page.