Social media feeds have been flooded with photos of those out protesting the death of George Floyd, but those same pictures can potentially supply law enforcement with a way to identify and surveil protesters. So encrypted messaging app Signal has released a new editing tool that automatically blurs people’s faces in your photos.
“The latest version of Signal for Android and iOS introduces a new blur feature in the image editor that can help protect the privacy of the people in the photos you share,” Signal announced in a blog post on Wednesday.
Due to COVID-19, many protesters are already wearing face masks. However, the new tool from Signal can do a more thorough job of scrubbing someone’s face from a photo. The feature appears when you write a message in the app, and want to attach a picture. Signal’s image editor will then appear with a new “blur faces” icon at the top.
Accessing the feature will allow Signal to use Apple or Google’s system libraries to scan the faces in the picture, and then blur them out. “In order to maintain your privacy, all of the processing happens locally on your own device,” Signal wrote in the blog post.
The blur tool isn’t flawless. So you can also obscure a person’s face manually by simply drawing the blur tool over additional faces or areas of the photo. Once you’re done, save the photo to your phone’s storage, enabling you to post the edited picture to other social media platforms.
Signal released the face-blur tool as BuzzFeed reports the US Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted authority to “conduct covert surveillance” on the George Floyd protests to stop suspected criminal threats. Downloads for Signal, which offers end-to-end encryption to protect chats and video calls from snooping, has also skyrocketed in the wake of the protests.
If you’re looking to blur your protest photos on a desktop computer, a software artist named Everest Pipkin has created a web-based tool that can do just that. In addition, Pipkin’s “Image Scrubber” can also remove the metadata from your pictures, which can reveal when the photo was snapped and with what kind of device.
The tool also works on phones, and no image-processing data is stored or sent anywhere, according to Pipkin.
