Fawkes is a powerful open-source tool designed to protect your privacy from unauthorised facial recognition.
Developed by researchers at the University of Chicago, Fawkes enables individuals to take control of their images online by “cloaking” them — subtly altering photos in a way that’s imperceptible to the human eye but confuses facial recognition systems.
These cloaked images prevent AI models from accurately learning or identifying your face, effectively poisoning the data that would otherwise be used to train surveillance algorithms or recognition systems without your consent.
Fawkes is not designed to hide your face in existing photos but rather to protect your likeness from being used to train recognition tools in the future. By sharing cloaked images online or on social media, you’re proactively disrupting the facial datasets that corporations and governments rely on to profile individuals.
How Does It Work
Fawkes uses a technique known as adversarial machine learning. In simple terms, it identifies how facial recognition systems “see” your face and then disrupts that view by injecting carefully crafted pixel-level noise into your photo. To a person, it still looks exactly like you. But to an AI model, you’re unrecognisable — or worse, you’re someone else entirely.
Once you’ve cloaked your images, you can upload them to social media as normal. The more cloaked images of yourself you post, the more you distort the data that facial recognition systems might use to profile you in the future.
Download Fawkes
Want to protect your photos from facial recognition systems?
Fawkes is a free, open-source privacy tool created by researchers at the University of Chicago. It lets you “cloak” your images to stop AI from learning what you look like — all without changing how your photos appear to the human eye.
Visit the Official Fawkes Download Page
What you’ll find:
Download links for macOS, Windows, and Linux
Full source code on GitHub
Technical documentation and research background
Instructions for using Fawkes to cloak your images
