You love the magic of AI photo editing but hate handing your unaltered face to some cloud server. A new privacy technology from Purdue University researchers might give you the best of both worlds. The patent-pending method masks sensitive parts of an image on your device before the photo ever reaches an AI platform. Only the masked version gets uploaded, which means the tool sees the background and your clothes but never your actual face. After the edit comes back, the technology seamlessly blends the original masked region back in. The result is a fully edited photo that looks completely natural, with none of your biometric data exposed. It also works with any commercial generative AI model, so no retraining or special apps are required. The approach works in two clean stages. Before uploading, you or the app draws a detailed outline around sensitive regions like your face. Those pixels never leave your phone or computer. Only the rest of the image travels to the editing tool, which processes it normally.…