[liberationtech] New YouTube face blur tool and its human rights implications

[Matisse Bustos Hawkes]

Hello all,
I'm sure some of you saw today's news that YouTube announced a new face
blur tool<http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/face-blurring-when-footage-requires.html>into
their editing suite - as they put it: "Whether you you want to share
sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces of the activists
involved, or share the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game
without broadcasting the children’s faces to the world, our face blurring
technology is a first step towards providing visual anonymity for video on
YouTube."

Many of the people on this list have been advocating to YouTube and other
commercial platforms to incorporate visual anonymity tools and while we
recognize this is not a panacea to the problem of online visual privacy -
we think its a step in the right direction.

My colleague Sam Gregory also wrote a blog today that discusses some of the
human rights use cases for a tool like this, not just in protest situations
or crises situations such as Syria, but for anyone concerned with anonymous
speech in our visual and networked age.
Here's his post:
http://blog.witness.org/2012/07/visual-anonymity-and-youtubes-new-blurring-tool/

Looking forward to people's thoughts. Would be great if you're willing to
share them publicly that you would do so on our blog or tweet @SamGregory,
me at @matissebh or @witnessorg

Thanks!
Matisse

*********
Matisse Bustos Hawkes
Communications Manager
WITNESS

See it. Film it. Change it.

t: 1 718 783 2000 ext. 306
matisse at witness.org
@matissebh | @witnessorg

*New Human Rights Channel on YouTube - curated by WITNESS + Storyful:
www.youtube.com/humanrights*
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