Ramping Up Privacy, Signal App Can Automatically Blur Faces In Photos

Protester face cover

Following the death of George Floyd, thousands of people are protesting against police brutality and to support the Black Lives Matters cause.

As communication is the key for gathering such large groups of people. And in the world that is connected to the internet, people would love to share just about anything, events like the protests in many cities in the U.S., as well as some other countries, are no exceptions.

Unfortunately for them, posting and sharing photos of protests aren't entirely safe, since the images could be used against the protesters, literally putting them in danger.

And here, the privacy-focused messaging app Signal is leveraging the trend by introducing a feature that should be useful for those protesters.

Here, the app wants to help its users to prevent them from being identified.

To to this, Signal introduces a way for users to blur faces inside photos, in order to prevent the authorities from snooping on people in those photos.

Signal automatic Blur Faces tool

In the announcement, Signal said that:

"Right now, people around the world are marching and protesting against racism and police brutality, outraged by the most recent police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. At Signal, we support the people who have gone into the streets to make their voices heard. We believe that something in America needs to change, and even if we don’t know exactly how, we support and trust in the people who are self-organizing around the country to figure it out."

Available on the Signal app for Android and iOS, the blur feature can be found in the image editor.

Users need to update their Signal up to the newest version, head to any chat, and tap on the camera icon to add images.

From there, they can select images from the gallery, to then tap the Blur icon. Then, they can tap on the Blur Faces toggle to automatically blue the faces inside the photo.

Once finished, users can save the photo to the gallery, and use it on other apps.

"Now it’s easy to give every face a hiding place, or draw a fuzzy trace over something you want to erase. Simply tap on the new blur tool icon to get started," said Signal.

Signal automatic Blur Faces tool

While this kind of feature should come in handy to protect the privacy of people, like during protests or other events, the feature is not perfect.

For example, the feature may not detect every face in an image a 100% of the time.

With this apparent flaw present, it's important for users to extend its functionality, like for example, by manually drawing the faces with the blur tool to obscure the additional faces or areas the automatic tool may have missed.

"We want to do something outside of the app too, so we’ll be distributing versatile face coverings to the community free of charge. We’ve been working to find a manufacturer capable of producing high volumes of face coverings in the current global circumstances. We’re finalizing a few remaining details and will provide more information soon," added Signal.

For users who really care about security and privacy, they can further protect themselves using an image scrubber software to remove all metadata from the images.

This will essentially make it difficult for anyone to trace the origins of the images.

Published: 
05/06/2020