The Good Robot Poisoning AI and Silencing Alexa with Heather Zheng
Jun 11, 2024
Heather Zheng, a leading researcher in privacy tech from the University of Chicago, dives into her groundbreaking work on surveillance defenses. She discusses her innovative Bracelet of Silence, which uses ultrasonic jamming to thwart unwanted listening. Zheng also highlights Glaze and Nightshade, technologies that help artists protect their work by 'poisoning' AI training data. Additionally, she explores the intriguing concept of using unique body movements for identification, and the importance of making privacy tools accessible and user-friendly.
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Wearable Ultrasonic Privacy Bracelet
- Heather Zheng describes building a wearable ultrasonic jammer as a private-person's defense against always-on microphones.
- The bracelet emits ultrasonic noise to disable nearby microphones within about a meter while staying usable and low-cost.
Design For Movement And Openness
- Design privacy wearables to rely on natural user movement to cover blind spots and minimize battery use.
- Make them fashionable and open-source so people can adopt and manufacture them widely.
Layered Defenses Against Model Training
- Glaze and Fox let individuals perturb images to change learned feature representations and frustrate style mimicry or facial recognition training.
- Nightshade scales that idea to 'poison' large models trained without consent, offering artists layered protections.