---
title: "Your Background Remover May Just Be Setting the Background to Be Transparent"
slug: your-background-remover-may-just-be-setting-the-background-to-be-transparent
canonical_url: https://nerdymomocat.github.io/posts/your-background-remover-may-just-be-setting-the-background-to-be-transparent/
collection: Stream
published_at: 2024-08-06T00:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2024-08-06T00:00:00.000Z
tags: 
  - Thoughts
  - Tips
author: "Nerdy Momo Cat"
---

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I came across [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1djpjk9/very_strange_question_i_used_an_ai_tool_to_remove/) on reddit today where they use [birefnet](https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/birefnet) for background removal and then [Florence](https://huggingface.co/spaces/gokaygokay/Florence-2) for object detection, and the Florence model ends up restoring their background. No, this isn’t a training data issue. TIL, Apparently some background removal apps just set the transperancy of background pixels to 0 — they still have all the original color information in them. And all someone would need to do to restore the image would be to set all pixels to be opaque.

A pretty huge privacy risk, especially for someone like me, who uses this as an alt account

[![A screenshot of a reddit post asking why a model can read background from their “background removed” image, showing florence input on left with no background and complete original image on right with all information.](https://nerdymomocat.github.io/_astro/Untitled.DceS2D6T_BeS1I.webp)](https://nerdymomocat.github.io/_astro/Untitled.DceS2D6T_BeS1I.webp)

A screenshot of a reddit post asking why a model can read background from their “background removed” image, showing florence input on left with no background and complete original image on right with all information.