Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/07/protect-your-identity-with-fake-profile-photos.html
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1 Like
17 Likes
Unrecognizable!
(but, seriously, can someone make a moustache-adding-machine-learning-thing-in-a-bob)
20 Likes
Hang about, does this mean you aren’t actually the daughter of that Senator from Alderaan?! 
17 Likes
What I find most I interesting is the at the AI is apparently a prude. None of these avatars appear to be pooping as in the uploaded image.
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According to my conspiracy theorist friends, if you submit a real photo of yourself to an enterprise that promises to give you a fake one…
…that’s how they get you.
19 Likes
Or you can just F5 this page a couple of times till you find a synthetic persona you like, no need to upload a photo of yourself.
11 Likes
Foolproof
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Um, why post a photo at all? What’s the point of the picture? I can’t think of a use case for this for myself, or anyone really. By the way, the picture in my BB profile is a picture of mine, but it’s not a picture of me.
8 Likes
My profile pic is only recognizable if we’re in a few places in the country. 
6 Likes
I’m still not entirely sure what I would do with this app.
If I understand right, the idea is to use a profile picture that roughly matches your own appearance from a high-level description (e.g. clean-shaven, short-haired man of North African origin in his mid-30s, or something), so you can give people a general sort of idea of your presentation when they’re interacting with you, but it’s not a photo of you or anyone else, so you’re neither doxing yourself or implicating somebody else.
Amusingly the app seems to think I’m a middle-aged, short-beard-wearing Middle Eastern or perhaps Central Asian man. It seems to be confused by my whiskers and/or the lighting in the photos I tried, as I’m mostly celtic in background and appearance.
EDIT OK they give a number of use cases - e.g. illustrations in textbooks, character pictures in games, profile photos in demo or test instances of software - so you can have varied appearances, but you’re not using anybody’s actual photos without permission.
5 Likes
That’s exactly how I’ve handled a few of my profile photos. I refreshed until I found a nondescript white guy with no obvious AI missteps and ran with it.
6 Likes
Do you know this chicken?
11 Likes
This just in - don’t talk to random telemarketers/randos/uncle tod just by screening your phone calls!
I suppose next you’ll insinuate that I’m not a young goat!
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Mine is!
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I was adopted.
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This is the most identifying profile pic I’ve used online (it might be the only one). If you don’t want a picture of yourself as a profile, then just don’t use a picture of yourself.
7 Likes
That service is useless since it states you are not allowed to use the images to break any laws. If you use the image in your profile on any social media service you would be violating their TOS and wrongfully accessing their server thereby violating the CFAA and committing a felony.
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