FANGØCam
Martin Nadal
In 2018 Google launched a google photos service that promised to make life easier for the user. The service would consist of a program installed by default on all android devices, with versions for IOS that made all photos taken with it to be uploaded for free to their cloud would make them easier to share and save. What they did not say in such a clear way is that those images were going to be used to train their recognition AI and improve their services. At the same time Amazon would launch Amazon Photos, a service with similar features that would serve to train its Amazon Rekognition service used by a number of U.S. government agencies and police departments, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E).
FANGØCam is a mobile camera application whose main feature is that the captured images by user are obfuscated making them unrecognizable and with no value to Big Tech as they cannot be used to train their recognition systems. This obfuscation process would be reversible so the user would still be able to access the photos by de-obfuscating them. FANGØCam proposes to continue the line of work initiated with FANGØ (2020) as a weapon of defense against surveillance capitalism. If FANGØ was a device that obfuscated our behavior in the network by generating artificial interactions that hinder the extraction of value. FANGØcam aims to prevent the extraction of value from our image gallery and to parasitize the archives and infrastructures of these companies.