The Need's Not Blurry: Safeguarding Identity on Youtube
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For those of us in the tech4dem business, we are well aware of the power that social media has to share photo and video evidence of violations of democratic processes and demonstrations calling for protection of citizen's rights. However, in a world where pro-democracy activists are increasingly becoming targets for their actions both online and offline, there is a pressing need to protect the identities of such individuals.
Enter the Cameras Everywhere initiative. Started by WITNESS, a leading organization on documentation of human rights abuses, this initiative is dedicated to safe video and photo documentation online and on mobile phones. They, together with the Guardian Project, developed the Android app ObscuraCam, which anonymizes photos by not only removing the meta data associated with the image file, but also by blurring, or obscuring, the faces shown in the photo.
This same functionality is now available through Youtube, known as a feature called "Blur All Faces". I tested this feature, and found it quite easy to use and function well. Here are the results and the steps on how you can blur faces too: