Privacy

31935 readers

787 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

164

Blur tools for Signal (signal.org)

submitted 11 months ago by btp@kbin.social to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Extrasvhx9he@lemmy.today 31 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Always heard blurring was ineffective and that solid colored boxes should be used instead

[–] Szymon@lemmy.ca 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 45 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Szymon@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This would demonstrate it well with physical concepts

https://youtu.be/UpJ-kGII074?si=EoQQeplKXYj5kMT0

[–] alwaysconfused@lemmy.ca 6 points 11 months ago

For those who are interested, here is a 20 minute mini-documentary about this individual that goes by the name of Mr. Swirl.

[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I trust that Signal wouldn't implement something if it was even questionably proven insecure

[–] ErwinLottemann@feddit.de 16 points 11 months ago

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...

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] Grunt4019@lemm.ee 3 points 11 months ago

The blur seems pretty good to me, doesn’t seem like you could do any reverse processing to identify the face post blur.