You should blur the faces in your protest photos. Here's how.

It is crucial to record the world, especially in major events such as protests and rallies that continue to occur across the country. But as any photojournalist or news photographer will tell you, publishing images around the world requires a huge responsibility. Every photo and video you share contains a lot of information, some of which you may not even realize.

Quickly blur face

The laws on the use of facial recognition remain worryingly loose, and facial images have become a valuable asset for everyone from marketers to police. However, you can protect these faces from snooping.

Just this week, Signal (the secure messaging service you probably should use) added a tool that allows users to blur faces in photos. This is a simple mechanism that allows users to blur someone's identity, which requires about the same amount of work as adding emojis. After capturing an image in Signal, you can export it to other applications before sharing.

Clear the image thoroughly

Faces aren't the only things you should consider clearing from photos. Every time you take a photo (especially using a mobile phone), the backend of the image file will contain a lot of identification information. If you have Photoshop, you can click File > File Information to view GPS data and original image data that may contain identification marks about your device or location.

If you want to use Photoshop to blur faces, you can use the Blur tool (looks like water drops in the toolbar) and increase the intensity. But blurring alone is not always the best way to mask faces, because neural networks can sometimes recognize them if you don't do it thoroughly enough. Use liquefied tools to distort and deform features to remove some of the terrain facial marks that the recognition software uses to identify individuals.

When exporting the image, make sure the None radio button is selected under the Metadata heading.

There are also some specialized applications for cleaning photos before posting them. For example, Image Scrubber is a tool designed specifically for extracting personal information from photos taken during protests. It works on laptops and two major mobile platforms and features a simple brush-based tool that completely obscures faces with blur. This is not the most elegant method, it does not automatically detect faces in photos like Signal's tools. However, it's very fast and simple, which is very important, especially when you're trying to share images quickly. It also clears the EXIF ​​data of the image, which includes information about the device that took it and its location.

Anonymous video clip

The faces in a blur video are much more difficult because you can't usually just point and click on the face. People move around the screen and it’s difficult to track them.

There are some tools to help. YouTube has an automatic feature that does this for you – it is designed to help content creators who don’t get the model authorization of people who appear in their videos. However, whether it is sufficient to fight powerful facial recognition is unclear.

Adobe's Premiere Pro has a mechanism to automatically block faces. You have to add a mosaic filter and create a tracking mask that automatically follows the subject as it moves through the screen. It works well, but you have to repeat this process for each face and adjust the tracking to make sure it works properly.

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