Blur tools for Signal
Blur tools for Signal: if you take or edit photos of crowds or strangers with Signal, you can use our face blur tool to quickly hide people's biometric face data.
You can then export the photo from Signal if you want to post it publicly.
https://signal.org/blog/blur-tools/Open linkView original on kbin.social
19 replies
Depends on how the blur is implemented…
I remember something like this on the Underhanded C Contest.
(It was for blacking out parts of an image.)
Always heard blurring was ineffective and that solid colored boxes should be used instead
I trust that Signal wouldn't implement something if it was even questionably proven insecure
I recall a story of a pedophile being caught because they posted pictures using a radial warp on the face. It wasn't too hard for enforcement to code a filter that undoes the radial warp, and instantly saw the original photo to identify and lock away the creep.
A warp doesn't technically lose the information, it merely displaces it. A good blur algorithm on the other hand will lead to loss of information.
This would demonstrate it well with physical concepts
https://youtu.be/UpJ-kGII074?si=EoQQeplKXYj5kMT0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/UpJ-kGII074?si=EoQQeplKXYj5kMT0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
For those who are interested, here is a 20 minute mini-documentary about this individual that goes by the name of Mr. Swirl.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Mr. Swirl
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
deleted
i think that is only valid for text, the method to restore blurred text is to draw and blur a lot of combinations and compare them to the blurred image. that's probably not a thing with faces i guess...
That does sound more effective. You really have to trust that the blur algorithm cannot be reverse engineered if you use that. Removing the data seems more certain than transforming it somehow.
The blur seems pretty good to me, doesn’t seem like you could do any reverse processing to identify the face post blur.
Hmm. Thats a neat feature. I love signal.
Article from 2020
damn, we really shouldnt discuss things that have happened in the past.
Shit guys, you heard of Bing?
Ah yes, let me just type into a search engine a search for all of the things that I don't know that I don't know about...