I've talked about facial recognition a few times on this site,  there's even a video of me testing out a supposedly anti-facial recognition T-Shirt, and more recently, I saw another news article on the topic which had enough academic weight to be plausible.

As these personal technologies develop we might find new ways to protect our own privacy, but what if your private data was leaked by a trusted third party? 

We share our photos for genuine reasons with all sorts of organisations, from government agencies to fitness centres, but it only takes for one of those to suffer a major breach for things to become very difficult for us.

Whilst passwords have their limitations, if we know a password has been compromised, we can change it. If our facial characteristics and geometry has been leaked, it is very difficult to get a new face, and with an increasing number of organisations using our faces as biometric identification, the risk is growing all the time.

The company I picked to write about today helps responsible organisations protect and secure facial imagery against malicious use by altering the images in a way that is imperceivable to the human eye, whilst making it very difficult for artificial intelligence facial recognition systems to interpret successfully.

D-ID (which stands for de-identification) have created a technique that removes biometric identification data from stored photo or video material, whilst maintaining the key attributes us humans look for in a photo, such as age, gender, emotion etc.

The technology is provided as a service to institutions that need to store photographic information, but have a obligation to protect that data from malicious use.