[bellyfullofbac]

The title assumes, with "censoring". A more appropriate title would be "Strange quirk when photographing German postal voting documents with the Xiaomi Camera".

But what a quirk, a real life object causing issues in software.

[q-rews]

This is not a quirk. It may be targeting the wrong document, but it’s a feature. Somebody spent time on making this behavior happen.

[bellyfullofbac]

People and their conspiracy theories... Cell phone cameras do a lot of post-processing, like skin smoothing, color enhancing and edge sharpening. Before jumping to this censorship conspiracy without evidence, I would investigate if one of those algorithms are buggy, and somewhere on the photo there is a combination of pixels that trigger the bug. Or sure, I'd investigate if there's censorship code, but I'm not going to assume there's some evil stuff going on before I see the code.

Maybe it's as simple as flash memory corruption on the guy's phone, the photo of mostly table and just the edge of the envelope is "simpler" (lots of the table which is just white), so maybe it takes less space. The more complicated photo would take more storage space, what if it's hitting a bad block or a period of bad blocks because of the physical memory layout (e.g. a sequence of bytes every 4MB is bad).

[solarkraft]

It’s probably unintended, but intentional censoring methods exist, as documented elsewhere in this thread. The most likely explanation seems to be this being a side-effect of those.

Your explanations appear less likely, as I’d expect those types of bugs to show differently.