Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sitkack 2213 days ago
It shouldn't blur, it should be a black box.

You could definitely take signals code, and run it over the set of test images and find which output matches closest to the target image.

2 comments

What set of test images?

https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/04/... is blurred by Signal. Suppose that you have all the photos that have been posted to Facebook, and that both of those women are on Facebook, and lastly that you have resources enough to run all of those through the Signal code. How would you match those other photos to the blurred part of this one?

Paging clearview.ai's enterprise sales department. Call for you on line 7...
Not just any black spot either. A black spot of random size larger than what you want to redact. That way you avoid leaking the size of what's being redacted. The size of what's being redacted can sometimes provide enough information to determine plausible contents: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-fe...
Ok, but just to be clear, we're redacting faces here. There isn't much meaningful here other than an exceptionally rough indication of age/development.
The examples on the Signal website give you hair color, hair style, likely race, and the shape of the top of the protesters' ears. While it's not definitive, given that a fuller redaction is easy and has no disadvantages, I don't see why someone shouldn't try.