YouTube’s newest feature is a one-click face scrambler for uploaded videos. The target audience? Syrian activists… and soccer moms who don’t want their child’s face online.
Citizen reporters in war zones and unfree societies around the world, from Syria to Zimbabwe, have embraced YouTube. YouTube has now launched a new tool for users in dangerous environments–a facial obscurer that digitizes faces in videos uploaded to YouTube. The algorithm-driven feature allows authors to automatically blur the faces in any video, public or private, on YouTube. A post on YouTube’s official blog also indicates the feature is aimed towards parents who do not want their children identified in publicly available video clips.
The facial obscurer is based on existing technology from Witness, a New York-based human rights video organization cofounded by musician Peter Gabriel. YouTube and Witness have had an ongoing relationship; the two collaborated (along with Storyful) on the recent launch of YouTube’s Human Rights Channel, which curates citizen journalism and news from unfree societies in a one-stop shop for activists, politicians, journalists, and interested members of the public.
