YouTube Offers a Way to Blur Faces, Protecting Identities in Videos

While this seems to be a great service, it only provides a filter to obscure the faces of those who protest and speak-out against their governments. Keep in mind this is a filter, the unfiltered video still exists, leaving an unprotected copy available and vulnerable to both warranted and unwarranted requests from government agencies and “security contractors”. Phlipn

YouTube Offers a Way to Blur Faces, Protecting Identities in Videos
By JENNIFER PRESTON – 26 July, 2012 – NYT

To help protect dissidents using video to tell their stories in countries with repressive government regimes, YouTube made available a new tool on Wednesday allowing people to obscure faces within videos uploaded onto its platform.

Protecting the identity of activists using social media has become a growing concern among human rights groups as authoritarian governments in some countries, including Syria, have been turning to citizen-generated videos of protests and other user-generated content on social media sites to identify and jail dissidents.

“Visual anonymity in video allows people to share personal footage more widely and to speak out when they otherwise may not,” Amanda Conway, a YouTube policy associate, wrote in a statement about the new tool. She pointed out that “human rights footage, in particular, opens up new risks to the people posting videos and to those filmed.”

Sam Gregory, program director for Witness.org, the leading human rights video advocacy and training organization, praised the move. Witness.org recently began collaborating with YouTube on a new human rights channel.

Mr. Gregory has been trying to raise awareness among dissidents and operators of social media sites about the importance of anonymity for activists when speaking out can put them at risk of retaliation.

In recent years, Mr. Gregory said, government officials in places like Myanmar, Iran and Syria have used videos of protests to identify dissidents. “There have been clear attempts to use citizen-shot footage to target people and punish them for speaking out against the regime,” Mr. Gregory said.

But Mr. Gregory said the tool would help more people than the activists involved in protests. He said that it would also protect the identity of people who want to use video to speak out about subjects like sexual assault and abuse. …more