[liberationtech] Enhancing Visual Privacy / Defeating Online Face Recognition

[Nathan of Guardian]

The Guardian Project and WITNESS are happy to announce the beta release
of ObscuraCam for Android. This is the first release from the
SecureSmartCam project, a partnership between our two organizations.
This is the result of an open-source development cycle, comprised of
multiple sprints (and branches), that took place over the last five
months. This v1 release is just the first step towards the complete
vision of the project.

The goal of the SecureSmartCam project to to design and develop a new
type of smartphone camera app that makes it simple for the user to
respect the visual privacy, anonymity and consent of the subjects they
photograph or record, while also enhancing their own ability to control
the personally identifiable data stored inside that photo or video.
Also, we think an app that allows you to pixelize your friends, disguise
their faces and otherwise defend their privacy just a little bit, is a
lot of fun and helps raise awareness about an important issue.

In this first release we have focused on "obscura" by optimizing the
workflow of identity obfuscation in still images. Future releases will
look at "informa", the process of properly gaining and recording
informed consent from subjects, while also moving to video processing
support.

Read the full post and see some sample pictures and screenshots on our blog:
https://guardianproject.info/2011/06/23/announcing-obscuracam-v1-enhance-your-visual-privacy/

If you have an Android phone, you can search for "obscuracam" in the
Android Market, or just find/install the app on the web here:
https://market.android.com/details?id=org.witness.sscphase1&feature=search_result

Finally, you can track our continuing progress, and review our notes,
designs and research through our public project:
https://github.com/guardianproject/securesmartcam/wiki