ungaze – hide faces on the web

A calmer web — with the faces turned down. ungaze automatically hides faces in web images as each page loads: it can blur, pixelate or bar them, on every site, including lazy-loaded images and images inside embedded frames. Think of it as an ad blocker for faces — a face-blur tool that takes the eye-contact out of your feed, for calmer, more focused browsing. No clicking, no list to maintain. Not everywhere? One click switches ungaze off for the site you are on. It stays off there — across tabs and restarts — until you switch it back on, and that covers frames embedded in the site as well. What people use it for • Focus. Faces in thumbnails and previews stop competing for your attention. • Less overload. If faces and gazes overstimulate or distract you, your feed gets quieter. • Less pull. Outrage and celebrity thumbnails lose their pull once the face is gone. What is in the package One model: the detector. It finds where a face is, never who it is. There is no recogniser, there are no reference images and no profiles — not switched off, absent. The download is 3.5 MB; you can unzip it and count. Everything stays on your device Processing runs entirely in the browser (ONNX Runtime, WebAssembly). No image data leaves your device, and no record of which faces you see. No account, no login, no tracking. The extension adds no address of its own to the traffic — it only re-reads the images the page already loaded. Being honest about it No face detector finds every face. Very small, heavily occluded, sharply angled or blurry faces can slip through; conversely, something that is not a face is occasionally hidden. ungaze is deliberately tuned to err on the generous side. If you depend on complete anonymisation, do not rely on a browser extension alone. Free and ungaze Free gives you the eye bar: a black bar across the eyes, on every face, on every site. It works, but it is crude – it covers the eyes, the rest of the face stays visible. ungaze unlocks the soft effects: blur, pixel and hexel, each with a feathered edge and aligned to head tilt, plus the settings to fine-tune them. Unlocked via ungaze.eu. What comes next Hiding specific people instead of all faces – that is what we are working on. Because it would have to compare faces with each other, it is legally demanding; we will only release it once it is fully in line with the EU AI Act and GDPR.