Deep Fakes: Future Threats to Privacy and Tips for Defense

Explore the Future Privacy Threats posed by Deep Fakes and Prevention Strategies

Today, Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a technology performing several tasks that are unimaginable for humans. Deep Fakes is an AI technology that is used to manipulate video, images, and audio hoaxes that are fake from existing images, audio, and video leading to misinformation. With the advancements in Deep Fakes, there arises a risk of personal privacy exploitation creating indistinguishable images. 

Deep Fakes pose a significant threat to society making it difficult to distinguish between reality and the fictional world. This creates a challenging situation for the people creating disbelief in visually represented information.

The Impact on Personal Privacy

Fake Images and personal videos

Deep Fake poses a threat by spreading misinformation through videos and images. Deep Fakes functionality to manipulate visual content creates fake fabricated images that can hamper the reputation of people. This exploits the privacy of an individual through fraudulent activities. This poses not only a threat to the reputation but has also the potential for psychological and legal consequences. 

Ethical and Legal Considerations

To safeguard an individual's personal privacy rights, technology solutions like deep fake detection algorithms are likely to be developed for identifying manipulated content. Notably, researchers are exploring ways to provide authentication to digital media with cryptographic techniques or mark the content with a watermark to authenticate it. To prevent the misuse of Deep Fake technology many legal regulations are enacted.

Personal and Financial Gain

Malicious activities can be conducted with Deep Fakes and the most common one is faking someone's identity, where they create fraudulent audio recordings and videos by impersonating individuals for committing fraud and other illicit activities. This exploitation of one's privacy hampers reputation causes financial losses and affects an individual on a psychological level. This encourages the spread of fake news making people difficult to find the truth.

Tips for Defense from Deep Fakes

Technology-based Detection System

Today, there are multiple technology-based detection systems. Leveraging forensic analysis, machine learning, and neural networks can assist in analyzing visual content to identify inconsistencies related to Deep Fakes. Forensic analysis evaluates and identifies to validate the reliability of the content. However, it is quite challenging to create automated detection tools to perform analysis on a real-time basis.

Policy formulation

According to a Member of WEF Global Future Council on Technology Policy, Charmaine Ng, International and multistakeholder efforts are required that explore can provide solutions to mitigate the problems that have arisen due to Deep Fakes. With the landmark Act, AI Act passed in Europe, the government is providing implications to combat the risk of Deep Fakes. Implying Watermarks or Authenticity marks into the visual content before distribution of the digital content signifies the originality of the content.

Creating public awareness

Creating public awareness and media literacy are key measures that can be taken against visual content manipulation by AI. Equipping individuals to identify reality from the manipulated images and creating awareness among individuals about the malicious activities. An individual needs to enhance the capability to verify information and to acquire critical thinking.

Going ahead, it is important to be equipped with tools to verify information and know to distinguish between fake and authentic information. These measures can protect the human against the threat of Deep Fakes.