[liberationtech] Enhancing Visual Privacy / Defeating Online Face Recognition

[Nathan of Guardian]

On 06/28/2011 02:45 PM, Brian Conley wrote:
> I look forward to testing the app, but I hope you'll take these concerns
> into consideration!

Excellent points. I think our focus on the face is in large part due to
the increasing automated use of technology to recognize a face, and
match that to a stored record from a government issued ID card. When you
add humans to the mix, it becomes much easier to generally identify a
setting, group or individual from specific context clues or even body
languages.

While we don't specifically promote this, our app can actually obscure
or redact multiple square or rectangle regions of the image. It does not
just have to be a face. We also have a reverse "bgPixelizer" filter,
which pixelizes everything outside the selected region.

You can see some examples of this on our ironic Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/obscuracam

best,
 nathan