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Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests
- _fullpint 6y agoAwesome tool! Unfortunately it isn’t fully functionally via safari mobile.
- erikpl 6y agoGreat concept! There should be an undo button, though. Especially without a brush size preview.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoNeed this but for video
- shivekkhurana 6y agoI recently found myself in a position where I had to blur a ton of faces from multiple pictures (about 100/day). It’s really tedious to do it manually and something like OpenCV shines. We found a repo [1] with python code that automatically detects and blurs faces. This script was one of many, except it had a very high accuracy. Over 90%. Removing exif data is a great idea. [1] github.com/telesoho/faceblur
- draw_down 6y agoFor protest photos, removing face is not enough. This tool says “face and other identifying info”, but not clear what that means exactly
- elliekelly 6y agoI’m reminded of a reddit thread a while back about the US government paying a large sum to create an “unblur” function for photoshop. Someone in the comments was able to rotate and flip a photo and use the photoshop blur tool to effectively undo a blur for free. Perhaps it’s better to remove the section of photo with a person’s face instead? Or draw a shape over their face and flatten the image? It seems to me as long as the pixels are there the identifying data is there for anyone willing to spend the time and effort to find it. Edit: Apparently it was interpol, not the US government. I can't find the reddit thread but here's a NYT article with the photo: https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/interpol-untwirls-a-suspected-pedophile/ https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/interpol-untwir...
- dmos62 6y ago> rotate and flip a photo and use the photoshop blur tool to effectively undo a blur I'm not sure I follow. Did he say "enhance" at any point during the process?
- andrewprock 6y agoIn the case you posted, the image is not blurred. Instead pixels are simply moved from one location to another via the "swirl" effect. Very little pixel information is lost in this process, and if you can recover the position transformation, you can easily undo it.
- thephyber 6y agoThis makes 100% sense compared to "undoing a blur" by applying another blur (with negative radius?).
- wongarsu 6y agoBlurring isn't that good at destroying information, I think we mostly use it because it's the best looking censoring attempt. I would pixelate the faces to be just 4x4 giant pixels. It destroys nearly as much information as blacking them out while still not disrupting the image too much
- noja 6y agoI would guess that pixelisation for videos rather than pictures probably reveals more information the longer the video.
- GreedCtrl 6y agoYes, you would need to fix the pixels to an initial or average value. I remember Nintendo didn't do this a couple years ago, accidentally leaking the name of a new game mode [1] for Smash Ultimate. [1] https://twitter.com/Lattie9001/status/1027204063811850240 https://twitter.com/Lattie9001/status/1027204063811850240
- 6y ago
- symisc_devel 6y agoThere is also the PixLab API which let you automatically apply a blur filter for each detected face or any other target regions you want using only two Rest API endpoints. Python: https://gist.github.com/symisc/6ecdea76ba0d33d73ea7f23cade0d216 https://gist.github.com/symisc/6ecdea76ba0d33d73ea7f23cade0d... PHP: https://gist.github.com/symisc/d54808915093e5375fdcb841e436580d https://gist.github.com/symisc/d54808915093e5375fdcb841e4365... Docs: https://pixlab.io/cmdls https://pixlab.io/cmdls
- chaps 6y agoUploading images to a blurring service is probably a really bad idea. At least OP's link does it in-browser.
- cowmix 6y agoThis is great for some situations. However, my personal policy is to upload my protest content to Google Photos asap (if appropriate). This makes sure your content is off your device if your phone gets confiscated AND it provides (be it thin) layer of authenticity/validation of the content.
- drocer88 6y agoCan't they find photos from others, examine the angle of your photos and prove it was you that took the pictures? They can also subpeona your carrier for records indicating you were a location at a certain time. I can see some diligent prosecutors going back and looking at data to gather evidence.
- jcims 6y agoI think the point is protecting custody of the photo rather than disavow taking it.
- thanksforfish 6y agoSee also, the ACLU Mobile Justice app: https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/aclu-apps-record-police-conduct https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
- clairity 6y ago> "...Google Photos..." everything you said was good except this. google is not your (or the protesters') friend.
- wiml 6y agoYou might also be interested in the CameraV / InformaCam project: https://guardianproject.github.io/informacam-guide/en/InformacamGuide.html https://guardianproject.github.io/informacam-guide/en/Inform...
- mceachen 6y agoGoogle Photos isn't going to provide you with any authenticity claims, and metadata gets scrambled by both their "high quality" and "original" settings. If you want to make sure the actual, original image gets stored safely on another device automatically, use SyncThing or Resilio Sync.
- dabei 6y agoNice. The most identifying EXIF data is probably the GPS location. What else have to be scrubbed?
- aesh2Xa1 6y agoThe tool blurs faces.
- dabei 6y agoSure. I'm just interested to know what else in EXIF could be identifying.
- JimDabell 6y agoCamera serial numbers. If you ever have your camera stolen, you can put the serial number into Stolen Camera Finder. It will show you the images uploaded to the Internet with your camera’s serial number so you can recover it. https://www.stolencamerafinder.com https://www.stolencamerafinder.com
- snazz 6y agoIs this data included in iPhone photos? I don't think so.
- mceachen 6y agoiPhone metadata includes several fingerprints that can be used to differentiate between different devices, including a serial number, uptime in seconds, and shutter release count (depending on the model of iPhone you have). (source: me examining as many different iPhone models and instances to build deduping heuristics for PhotoStructure)
- snazz 6y agoInteresting! That's more information than I thought. Thanks for informing me!
- rixrax 6y agoFor meta data, exiftool is handy for removing metadata[0]. $ exiftool -all= foo.jpg And even better, save image first as .bmp or other format that doesn’t support metadata. Then reload and convert to jpeg, and run the exiftool on this image. [0] https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce/Remove-EXIF-Metadata-from-Photos-with-exiftool https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sau...
- dicknuckle 6y agoor if you're in a rush just post them to imgur where all exif data is dropped.
- ape4 6y agoNow I would hope everyone is wearing a mask
- hirundo 6y agoThe protests were sparked by the lack of accountability of the police resulting in police brutality. The violent people among the protesters are subject to the same incentives. The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence. Anonymizing photos of the violent ones is therefore likely to support their actions by making accountability less likely. To scrub ethically, limit it to the non-violent protestors. To support non-violence, better to help identify the violent people -- police or civilian -- the opposite of anonymizing them.
- whatshisface 6y agoWhat's your plan, exactly, for making the program not work for you if you've smashed a window?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- milquetoastaf 6y agoThe point of a riot is to riot
- Mirioron 6y agoTo add though: it's not easy to tell who are the non-violent and who are the violent protestors. Sometimes violent protestors hang out in the crowd and only strike at opportune moments. If they're blurred out like everyone else during the times they are not violent then it becomes harder to hold them accountable.
- michaelt 6y agoGiven that this is a protest about cops getting away with brutality even when there's clear evidence I think "gather evidence against both sides equally" is unlikely to be convincing argument to protesters.
- downerending 6y agoI doubt any criminal really wants to be captured on video. Having just watched a couple of videos this morning of "protesters" viciously kicking their unconscious victims in the head, I'm very much against the idea of anonymizing any of this.
- leni536 6y agoHow resilient is blurring against deconvolution?
- ibrarmalik 6y agoCan deconvolution create new data? I thought it was just a way to upscale images.
- klyrs 6y agoIf a blur filter uses a convolution, then it's invertible through a deconvolution.
- im3w1l-alt 6y agoThere will be some information loss from edge effects and quantization noise. But mostly invertible.
- klyrs 6y agoYou're not wrong but invertible filters, noise or no, are simply not anonymizing and should not be used for that purpose.
- ivanbakel 6y agoDeconvolution is any attempt to recover data that has been passed through some known transformation. It can "create new data" because it is effectively mathematically-educated guesswork. In the case of upscaling an image, deconvolution involves looking for images which, when scaled down, resemble the original image being upscaled. That kind of pre-image approach can be applied to blur as well (if the blur process is deterministic).
- leni536 6y agoIt can't, but blurring might remove less data than what you want.
- chestervonwinch 6y ago
- fnord77 6y agowas thinking about a way to do this for live stream video. I think it is doable but would probably cause too much battery drain on the device.
- est31 6y agoYou could stream to your computer at home and then to the world. But it's weird that the live streaming websites don't offer it as feature.
- blhack 6y agoThe protests are being live-streamed on Facebook, twitch, YouTube etc. So while they is interesting, it is ultimately useless. The data is already out there.
- iNate2000 6y agoAnd anyone who wants to gather intelligence can simply take their own photos and videos.
- lucb1e 6y agoDoesn't mean we don't have to make it even easier, though.
- lapnitnelav 6y agoNot if you hijack the camera directly* :) [1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/creativetech_tensorflowjs-bodypix-chromeextension-activity-6669414588058091520-GjNb https://www.linkedin.com/posts/creativetech_tensorflowjs-bod...
- JabavuAdams 6y agoIt's better to black out faces than to blur them. It's feasible to unblur / un-pixelate faces, especially if there's more than one frame.
- diNgUrAndI 6y agoIt is hosted on github pages. Not sure if it would violate ToS. You may host it elsewhere. Reference: https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/about-github-pages https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...
- mceachen 6y agoWhat policy do you think this tool violates?
- jokit 6y agoFrom Cambridge Dictionary; Protesters: someone who shows that they disagree with something by standing somewhere, shouting, carrying signs, etc. Terrorist: someone who uses violent action, or threats of violent action, for political purposes. There is a false narrative out there conflating the two. Don't be fooled.
- blargmaster33 6y agoYay let's protect looters pillagers and scum!
- rsync 6y agoWhile I can't make useful comments on protests or strong anonymity, wrt photo metadata, I can say that I scrub metadata from photos that leave my possession, as a matter of course, using 'exiftool'. Here is how you read the existing metadata: exiftool -a -u -g1 IMG_0708.JPG | more ... and here is how you scrub it: exiftool -all= IMG_0708.JPG (you could read it again, after scrubbing, to demonstrate it is gone ...)
- LeoPanthera 6y agoI've had this function added to my shell for years: stripexif () { exiftool -all= "$@" }
- pengaru 6y agoImageMagick's `convert` also supports stripping such metadata, the flag is -strip. I nearly always scale+compress photos that leave my possession, and usually using convert, so adding -strip is a nice streamlined way of doing all at once.
- mrkramer 6y agoAssuming this tool was intended for those who want to share photos on social media, Facebook and Instagram already strip metadata out from the photos you share otherwise anybody could scrape the photo and get metadata. I'm not sure for Twitter tho but I think it is the same.
- arkadiyt 6y agoTwitter also strips exif data from displayed images. That said, I would assume that all social media platforms permanently store that data (even though it's not in the displayed image), and would be forced to give it up under subpoena.
- mrkramer 6y ago"all social media platforms permanently store that data" exactly but storing metadata has 2 purposes; one for security reasons and second for analyzing the data and creating advertising solutions based on that data.
- anigbrowl 6y agoHow much do you trust them not to save that information?
- mrkramer 6y agoI would rather trust multi billion dollar companies than smaller ones which are trying to make a quick buck out of my data. And big companies are under much more scrutiny than smaller ones.
- kmfrk 6y agoIt's a good default thing to do, because one day, like me, you realize that services like Slack don't wipe metadata in photos: https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/11/slack-strips-location-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/11/slack-strips-location-data.... Twitter often shows geodata for users, but I think that's app-based and not derived from photo uploads.
- fuckingGaayyyy 6y agoGay.
- verdverm 6y agoWhy does one need to scrub faces from protests images? Does it even matter with the volumn of images being captured? Is it because people are committing more crime than the original offense?
- jlokier 6y agoCould it be that sometimes the police, government, etc. will make your life miserable even if you haven't commit a crime because they don't like something you did? Nah. They would never do anything like that. As everyone knows, all police are paragons of moral excellence in every country in the world at all times. Governments have definitely never, ever gone after innocent protesters. </sarcasm>
- verdverm 6y agoHow much worse are the police from other profession? i.e. how skewed are different professions w.r.t. morals? Do you think lawyers are worse? Politicians? The Media? Where do police fit into this spectrum? Are all police bad? What percentage? <perspective> (you can close this tag if you wish)
- jlokier 6y agoIF they are identical morally there's still a problem, because they are not identical in power. With power comes a responsibilty to be better than others, and if that's not something you can count on, which it isn't, we need to protect others.
- verdverm 6y agoWell they aren't equal, nor has humanity never complained about those in power... Was the police violence worse during the time of the civil rights? Were the protesters ever violent or turn to rioting? What would Dr King say about the protests?
- 6y ago
- hangphyr 6y agoThe timing of the release of this tool seems a bit innapropriate, given the state of rioting in a few US cities now. It's going to be incredibly draining on law enforcement in the US for a few years to identify and prosecute criminals involved in riots. Most victims already who have lost their homes, their businesses, and even their loved ones will mostly likely never see the criminals brought to justice given the scale of the violence. It could be useful to protect people from relatiation under an authoritarian government, such as in Hong Kong. I dislike the idea of a government using mass automatic identification, that could be used again by authoritarians for terrible goals. I also dislike the idea of the opposite and using automatic anonymizing to protect criminals during riots. We're probably going to keep seeing an arms race in this, with good and bad actors on all sides.
- heronalps 6y agoI admit the protest in Hong Kong was largely peaceful, but it's hard to deny that a fringe of protestors were looting and resorting to violence as well. There is no key difference between law enforcement by police in HK and the US.
- jessaustin 6y agoOne wonders whether the American protests are getting quite so much CIA cash...
- pstuart 6y agoWhat about identifying the police who are breaking the law? Not just the ones attacking peaceful protesters, but the agents provocateur? Peaceful protest is being squashed and de-legitimized. This is the flowering of fascism.
- jariel 6y ago"Peaceful protest is being squashed and de-legitimized. This is the flowering of fascism." This is really not true. The protests turned quickly into riots and the more heavy-handed police tactics literally started only days later. The rioters burnt down a police station for gosh sakes. There are no 'protetors' clashing with police in a violent way. I think decent folks move on after curfew. It's the adventure-seeking rabble, those out for some photos, who want to see the action first hand, who might want to light something in fire. The people not dispersing at curfew I don't think are ideological or protesters in any sense of the word. It's just youth in antagonism for every and all reasons, as old as time.
- wikibob 6y agoCan someone package this as an iOS and Android app and get it into the app stores?
- dogma1138 6y agoThere are quite a few apps for iOS at least that remove metadata https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/photo-video-metadata-remover/id1079710135 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/photo-video-metadata-remover/i... There are also a few that do face detection and blur on the AppStore.
- paddlesteamer 6y agoSince the Antifa will be designated as a terrorist organization[0], I don't suggest you guys to trust github pages, google photos, drive, etc. Tomorrow there may be a subpoena for the IP addresses who use this tool. It may not be enough proof but it'll cost you a lot of money and time. I'd be using local tools like exiftool or gimp. [0]: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1267129644228247552 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12671296442282475...
- williesleg 6y agoThat will not end well.
- Ansil849 6y agoSome tips to maximise user privacy while deploying this tool: 1) The code, for now, runs locally. This is good. To avoid the possibility of the code being tampered with at a later day (for example, it could be modified to send copies of the image to a server), download the webpage and use the saved copy, not the live copy. 2) Do not use the blur functionality. For maximum privacy, this should be removed from the app entirely. There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques. 3) Be weary of other things in the photograph that might identify someone: reflections, shadows, so on. 4) Really a subset of 2 and 3, but be aware that blocking out faces is often times not sufficient to anonymise the subject in the photo. Identifying marks like tattoos, or even something as basic as the shoes they are wearing, can be used to identify the target.
- NightlyDev 6y ago"There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques" Any examples? You can't reverse it if the data is gone.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThe data may still be there, it just looks like it's gone.
- okamiueru 6y agoBlur is in effect a lowpass filter on the image. The high frequency information is gone. Reconstruction based on domain knowledge, like AI methods etc is unlikely to be able to reconstruct the distinguishing features between people enough to avoid false positives when used to search for similar people. Then again, maybe groups of people can be associated together, and a poor match is good enough given other clues. So, much better to be safe than sorry. I'm not sure if I had a particular good point to make, other than that blurring does remove information that cannot easily be reversed. You can probably make very convincing reconstructions, but they might not look like the original person.
- 6y ago
- kposehn 6y agoSite won’t scroll on iOS keeping me from reading the full readme.
- dfee 6y agoProtests or riots?
- anonymousiam 6y agoTimely article, but what about violent criminal activity during protests? Peaceful protests are wonderful and have been very effective throughout history. The protests we've seen for the past few days are not helping anything. Yes, people are angry at the criminal behavior of the police officer/murderer, but manifesting that anger by destroying property, looting, injuring, and threatening others, is only going to justify the use of more police violence.
- asutekku 6y agoI’ll just play the devil’s advocate, but when have peaceful protests ever helped the cause? Those are forgotten as soon as they are over.
- anonymousiam 6y agohttps://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gandhi-leads-civil-disobedience https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gandhi-leads-civ... https://time.com/5101740/martin-luther-king-peaceful-protests-lessons/ https://time.com/5101740/martin-luther-king-peaceful-protest...
- jbay808 6y agoIndian independence? Martin Luther King?
- jude- 6y agoIn both cases, the protestors were violently attacked over and over. Also, both Ghandi and MLK were murdered for their efforts.
- jbay808 6y agoYes, a peaceful protest can be violently attacked and still be a peaceful protest. It's not required that the police be peaceful, only the protesters.
- artifact_44 6y agoAs of today, the president is designating antifascist protestors as a terrorist organization.
- groby_b 6y agoThe "president" has his thumb up his ass, because that's actually not a thing he's legally able to do. Neither is there a domestic terrorism statute, nor is there any legal authority to designate a domestic organization as a terrorist group. So, even though the "president" is pro-fascist, he's really still got his hands tied there.
- bardworx 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia (maybe not optimal source), via the PATRIOT Act, groups can be designated as domestic terrorists. I don’t know anything about this topic. Can you expand why you said that there is no “...legal authority to designate a domestic organization as a terrorist group”. I’m no asking about Antifa specifically but generally. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_Un...
- groby_b 6y agoThe very first sentence of the Wikipedia article you linked to has your answer: "Domestic terrorism in the United States consists of incidents confirmed as terrorist acts." incidents confirmed as terrorist acts. The PATRIOT act defines acts of terrorism. It's on a case-by-case basis. It is not possible to take a domestic organization and designate it wholesale as terrorists. The page also explains that there is no federal criminal offense that is "domestic terrorism".
- groby_b 6y agoI see the fascist downvote brigade has arrived.
- japhyr 6y ago
- afwaller 6y agoInstead of blurring you should add a significant amount of extraneous information (random noise) and then mosaic (downsample). If you’d like to have a smooth looking censored image you can then blur the mosaic result to have a smooth transition between the censored and original image. If you simply blur or simply downsample there’s a significant ability to recover data or iterate over data to recover likely inputs. Other posts have discussed deconvolution, but think of a downsample as a hash - you can build a rainbow table of inputs, easily for numbers, with more difficulty for faces. If you have a limited pool of “suspects” this technique can work well. Just as with hashing, you should add a salt to the image before downsampling or blurring to make recovery of the original input more difficult. In this case the “salt” is random noise.
- bobloblaw45 6y agoSo I might look silly here but what I do is take a snip of the displayed picture and save and use that. Was I doing it wrong? All I was really concerned about was getting rid of metadata tied to my phone.
- lazugod 6y agoCan face blurring be regulated as a protected form of encryption?
- comboy 6y agoReally weird that nobody in the thread is pointing out that this is basically a website that says "give me your photos, specifically from protests, which have details that you want to keep private". It doesn't matter that it theoretically all happen in the browser. You can serve different versions to different IPs etc. Every heuristic in me would be screaming don't use that if I would have a need for such tool.
- aith 6y agoIt's a simple static site with no server involved. Everything happens client side. You could turn off your internet while you're using it if you wanted to make sure no data is exposed.
- dzhiurgis 6y agoWould a service worker running in background be able to upload your sensitive data once you are back online?
- KingMachiavelli 6y agoTrue, but it's only safe if you do that. You have to either inspect the code every time you use the site or run it locally. Until subresource integrity [1] becomes widely used & the capability to 'pin' a given script to a specific version, web applications can not be used without at least trusting the owner of the domain. A better example is Protonmail, a secure email service. It has a nice web client and there is an 3rd party desktop/electron version of the same size called Electronmail. While both essentially run identical code, the electron version is more secure because even Protonmail insert a backdoor for a single or # of users. They would have to at least publish the backdoor in the vanilla code at which point, the maintainers of Electronmail will probably raise the alarm. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...
- rkagerer 6y agoWrite a little piece of open-source client software to take a hash of the source code. Check the hash every time you use it. Spread the tool around to a community of people who review every time the hash changes and publish (separately) a history of attested hashes.
- booleandilemma 6y agoIn the context of the riots going on right now, I’d rather have their faces be ID’d so they can never find a job again, assuming they had one in the first place.
- Felk 6y agoRegarding metadata: Considering windows already lets you strip metadata from images directly from the properties menu, is there anything this tool or other metadata stripping tools do that goes beyond what windows offers? Is it risky to rely on the built-in tool?
- terrycody 6y agoSimple and effective like a charm
- CGamesPlay 6y agoThis is an ideal tool to be hosted on ipfs, to prevent tampering with the code in the future.
- pabs3 6y agoA general tool for metadata removal: https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/ https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/ https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2-web/ https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2-web/
- mleonhard 6y agoRemoving EXIF data is not enough. > “Like snowflakes, no two smartphones are the same. Each device, regardless of the manufacturer or make, can be identified through a pattern of microscopic imaging flaws that are present in every picture they take,” says Kui Ren, lead author of a new study describing the smartphone-identifying technology. “It’s kind of like matching bullets to a gun, only we’re matching photos to a smartphone camera.” https://www.futurity.org/smartphones-cameras-prnu-1634712-2/ https://www.futurity.org/smartphones-cameras-prnu-1634712-2/
- kickscondor 6y agoI wonder if there are tools for removing (or repatterning) these as post-processing. In fact, you’d think single pixel defects might get washed out in conversion to a lossee image format.