“On August 1, [Jonathan] Hirshon tossed a wrench into the gears of Facebook and Google facial-recognition algorithms built to threaten his 20 years of “cherished anonymity.” In a post on Facebook—visible only to his friends, or course—he threw down the gauntlet.
“If you’re so inclined,” he wrote, “take a moment and tag me in some random picture or image. A leaf on the wind, a howler monkey, geometry equations, George Clooney, a large steaming pile of excrement—select an image that you think best suits me or [is] based solely on your whim.”
The purpose was clear. If enough people did his bidding, the collection of false positives associated with the tag “Jonathan Hirshon” could “both confuse Facebook and Google’s algorithms and help to bury any real pics of me that eventually turn up in a sea of anarchic image randomness.”
By phone, Hirshon called his challenge “kind of a combination of psychological and sociological hacking, all mixed together. Or algorithmic hacking.”
You can read more, but (probably) not see him at www.fastcompany.com.