Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

everestpipkin.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 410 posts

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

#141

Post by radarsat1 »

okamiueru wrote: post #128
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data may still be there, it just looks like it's gone.

Blur is in effect a lowpass filter on the image. The high frequency information is gone. Reconstruction based on domain knowledge, like AI methods etc is unlikely to be able to reconstruct the distinguishing features between people enough to avoid false positives when used to search for similar people. Then again, maybe groups of people can be associated together, and a poor match is good enough given other clues. So…

> The high frequency information is gone

diminished in power.

It's only gone if it goes below the quantization threshold. Depends on the filter.

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

#142

Post by throwaway2048 »

dfee wrote: post #135
Uehreka wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if our law enforcement had legitimacy and credibility, because then we could know that showing someone’s face would lead to them being arrested and facing a sentence commensurate with what they had done. But unfortunately this is not the case. Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine…

> Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine, or some light jail time. It will lead to extrajudicial retaliation and possibly death. What? I’m not sure what country you’re talking about. Are you talking about America? Our police find rioters and shoot them dead in the street? Man, I feel like you live…

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...

This is the country you live in, if you want ignore that fact its on you.

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

#143

Post by tal8d »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #129
augustt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - the actual phrase is "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

Thanks for clarifying for me. Still, I would hope that as police are investigated they are held to a high standard of behavior. They do after all have a near monopoly on the lawful use of violence.

I absolutely agree that cops should be held to a higher standard, but that is a very different discussion. Imagine trying to steer the conversation similarly for any other class of crime: "You can't blame the school shooters... they naturally strike out at what is within their reach, they should be given space to express their outrage. We need to talk about bullying."

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

#144

Post by jlokier »

verdverm wrote: post #102

Why does one need to scrub faces from protests images? Does it even matter with the volumn of images being captured? Is it because people are committing more crime than the original offense?

Could it be that sometimes the police, government, etc. will make your life miserable even if you haven't commit a crime because they don't like something you did?

Nah. They would never do anything like that.

As everyone knows, all police are paragons of moral excellence in every country in the world at all times.

Governments have definitely never, ever gone after innocent protesters.

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

#145

Post by yters »

zouhair wrote: post #116
hangphyr wrote: post #106

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 sc…

> 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 Good. Black people factually live under an authoritarian regime in the US.

What are the facts supporting your claim?

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

#146

Post by throwanem »

dfee wrote: post #135
Uehreka wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if our law enforcement had legitimacy and credibility, because then we could know that showing someone’s face would lead to them being arrested and facing a sentence commensurate with what they had done. But unfortunately this is not the case. Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine…

> Showing the face of a protestor smashing in a window will not lead to that protestor being brought to court and handed a sentence for community service, a fine, or some light jail time. It will lead to extrajudicial retaliation and possibly death. What? I’m not sure what country you’re talking about. Are you talking about America? Our police find rioters and shoot them dead in the street? Man, I feel like you live…

> I feel like you live in a different country than me

Yeah, white America. We call it "fascism" when that gets ruled the same way black America always has been.

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

#147

Post by adrianmonk »

NightlyDev wrote: post #120
Ansil849 wrote: post #119

Some tips to maximise user privacy while deploying this tool: 1) The code, for now, runs locally. This is good. To avoid the possibility of the code being tampered with at a later day (for example, it could be modified to send copies of the image to a server), download the webpage and use the saved copy, not the live copy. 2) Do not use the blur functionality. For maximum privacy, this should be removed from the app…

"There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques" Any examples? You can't reverse it if the data is gone.

I think people are stumbling over the word "reverse" here. A common use of "reverse" is to undo. And you're 100% right that you cannot undo the destruction of information.

But instead, "reverse" is being used here to mean something like analyze or to apply countermeasures to defeat the obfuscation.

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

#148

Post by fragmede »

NightlyDev wrote: post #120
Ansil849 wrote: post #119

Some tips to maximise user privacy while deploying this tool: 1) The code, for now, runs locally. This is good. To avoid the possibility of the code being tampered with at a later day (for example, it could be modified to send copies of the image to a server), download the webpage and use the saved copy, not the live copy. 2) Do not use the blur functionality. For maximum privacy, this should be removed from the app…

"There are _a lot_ of forensic methods to reverse blur techniques" Any examples? You can't reverse it if the data is gone.

Here's a very specific example, having to do with a much smaller data-set, the OCR font used for the routing and account number on cheques.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-uncover-blurred-information-in...

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

#149

Post by pengstrom »

hangphyr wrote: post #106

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 sc…

The US leadership's is widely considered authoritarian already. Trumps response to the unrest has only fortified that perception.

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

#150

Post by throwaway2048 »

yters wrote: post #145
zouhair wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Good. Black people factually live under an authoritarian regime in the US.

What are the facts supporting your claim?

This definitely seems like a good faith attempt to litigate the history of black oppression in the USA from first principles.
Post reply on HN