If you’re going to Germany, be sure you haven’t de-identified your passport photograph
In April 2019, I wrote an article about Israeli company D-ID, founded by Gil Perry, after meeting him at the Netexplo Innovation Observatory, an event I attend every year.
Perry’s company specializes in de-identification, a process that introduces slight modifications to photographs of faces that cannot be perceived with the naked eye, but which prevent them from being used to feed facial recognition databases. Digital facial recognition is based on a few measurements in an image, so what the D-ID algorithms do is to slightly separate the eyes or modify imperceptibly certain features so they no longer coincide with the original parameters in a photograph, thus preventing algorithmic programs from recognizing them.
As I noted in my piece, this is a very effective way of protecting our privacy: D-ID’s algorithms can easily be applied to any photograph of ourselves we upload to social networks so as to prevent them from identifying us in case they are being used to feed databases, which had happened to me before. Now, the German government has announced a ban on the use of these kind of morphing technologies on photographs for official documents such as identity cards or passports, arguing that these modifications could be used to assign several identities to a single…
