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Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

everestpipkin.github.io

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Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#101

Post by tal8d »

blotter_paper wrote: post #78
tal8d wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah justice. It is better that ten innocent persons suffer than that one guilty escape. -- Bizzaro William Blackstone

The topic of the week is an extrajudicial murder committed by a team of four cops; where was our restraint in deciding the fate of George Floyd? Do these officers deserve nicer treatment than this system gave Floyd? Did Floyd deserve this treatment, too? If so, why didn't he get it?

That would be the topic of the week, if we were seeing protests. What we are actually seeing is something that is quickly approaching race riots, here is how that has happened:

Local government officials pulled law enforcement, because cops are bad and protesters are good.

Looting and arson cause hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage to those that have nothing to do with the purported cause of the riots.

Local government officials offer easily disprovable lie, claiming the majority of those arrested are shown to be outsiders. The media doesn't bother fact checking, they instead helpfully inform the public that "white nationalists" are secretly tricking the poor helpless minorities into burning down their own communities.

Local government officials admit that they were lying. The media pretends to not hear, continues screeching about nazis in blackface looting Footlocker.

And here you advocate burning down three entire precincts in order to ensure that three officers get prosecuted (and be honest, you mean "convicted"). That is absolutely insane, it is the direct opposite of justice and a perfect example of someone being ruled by their emotion.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#103

Post by kmfrk »

mrkramer wrote: post #82

Assuming 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.

It'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....

Twitter often shows geodata for users, but I think that's app-based and not derived from photo uploads.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#104

Post by frootloops2 »

adge wrote: post #31
hirundo wrote: post #13

The 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 i…

Many organizers of protests in Furguson, peaceful or otherwise, have since been found murdered in ways that suggest they were literally hunted down and killed for their involvement. Multiple have been found shot through the head in burned out cars to destroy all evidence. If they broke the law it still does not merit being executed in the street. ( https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie... ) In…

Respect to NBC for reporting the African American male victims of homicide (50/65) but not the culprits (14/15).

Sometimes the "other side of the story" (as White Supremacists would say) does NOT need to be heard. Not now.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#105

Post by tehjoker »

hirundo wrote: post #13

The 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 i…

"Ferguson, Mo., Activists Are Dying and It’s Time to Ask Questions"

https://www.theroot.com/ferguson-activists-are-dying-and-it-...

"Crawford was found shot to death Thursday night in his car, just like activist Darren Seals in 2016 and protester DeAndre Joshua the night of the Ferguson verdict in 2014. The latter two had gunshot wounds to the head and their cars were lit on fire. Crawford, it is believed by police, shot himself in the back seat of his car either in an attempted suicide or by accident."

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#106

Post by hangphyr »

The 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.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#108

Post by mrkramer »

anigbrowl wrote: post #98
mrkramer wrote: post #82

Assuming 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.

How much do you trust them not to save that information?

I 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.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#109

Post by tehjoker »

jtbayly wrote: post #68
zaaakk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the police say otherwise? Nice critical thinking.

Does anybody have any evidence they are connected? I’m not saying thy are or aren’t, but it’s at least worth noting what the police say.

It's not really. Police lie constantly, especially when it would implicate them. Their statements carry zero information except where they provide positive publicly verifiable evidence. Unsettling and sad, but its the truth.

Re: Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

#110

Post by MauranKilom »

siberianbear wrote: post #56
elliekelly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’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 lon…

That wasn't really a "blur", though. A swirl like that is just moving pixels around. If know how the algorithm works, you can reverse it. Probably, it was done with a common program like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp or something. One could write a program that would just "unswirl" with various parameters and generate a bunch of images, and a human could pick out the one that looks like an unswirled image. If you can pick…

> That can't be done with a blur. In a blur, pixels are merged or averaged together and information is lost.

I'd be careful with that assumption. The only thing that really loses information is the discretization back into 0-255 range, and that naturally loses very little information.

If you consider the pixels as a large vector of values, you're effectively multiplying it by a matrix (plus discretization afterwards). If that matrix has (near) full rank, you can restore (close to) all the information.

Consider an grayscale image with two pixels a = 10, b = 20. I apply a blur that transfers 10% of each pixel to the other one. I end up with 11, 19. I'm left with the information 0.9 a + 0.1 b = 11, 0.1 a + 0.9 b = 19. Clearly this system can be solved uniquely. Or equivalently, the blur matrix (and I don't mean the kernel but the full blur operation matrix) is [[ 0.9 0.1 ] [ 0.1 0.9]], which has full rank and is thus invertible.

You'd be surprised at the amount of image detail that can be recovered by filtering when the original distortion function is known. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution and the lower half of that page's "See also" links section.

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