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Image Scrubber: tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests

everestpipkin.github.io

251–260 of 410 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the civil rights leaders, I’d say people remember Martin Luther King Jr the best. It’s probably also worth asking: when have violent protests ever helped the cause? I think that the violence of the protests helped to get Derek Chauvin arrested. But I’m not sure that continued violence will help the broader movement.

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal yo…

I actually agree with the protestors, not just in their goal but also in their methods thus far. Like I said in my earlier post, I think this helped get the police officer fired and arrested.

I hope this doesn’t get me labeled as “white” or “moderate” (I am neither).

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

#253
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about identifying the police who are breaking the law? Not just the ones attacking peaceful protesters, but the agents provocateur? Peaceful protest is being squashed and de-legitimized. This is the flowering of fascism.

Looting and rioting and attacking shop owners trying to save their businesses and burning down cars and buildings. Not peaceful protests.

And agents provocateur. Violence is part of the plan.

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

#254
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you stop an EMT from checking the pulse of somebody who your co-worker has been choking to death for minutes? Does that make you an accomplice, too? If your city charged these cops justly then nobody would be burning it down; cure your disease and the symptoms will go away.

Yup, I'd love if we were able to be a unified front and collectively say the mayhem will not stop until all four involved are charged. And if they're not convicted... 1992 will look like a joke.

aaugustt says>"And if they're not convicted... 1992 will look like a joke."

So what if a jury finds them innocent, which is highly likely? What do you mean "1992 will look like a joke"?

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

#255

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…

I mean, if you have a prior probabilistic model for what a face looks like, you could combine that with standard deconvolution and get a scary good reconstruction I imagine

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

#256

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…

I opened https://github.com/everestpipkin/image-scrubber/issues/5 to discuss how to encourage people to use this tool responsibly. Please contribute your knowledge!

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

#257
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that be the homicide rate that's shown no significant first-derivative variance from the national rate since 2015? - the homicide rate that you're not even bothering to cite correctly? Those are figures per hundred thousand , not per hundred as you give them here. In either case, you're massively misrepresenting the "stand down" order, which was not a policy of indefinite disengagement, but rather a specific in…

This article from USA Today in 2018 implies the effect has been indefinite. Interesting graph, too, that shows the drop in police actively stopping petty crime correlates with a growth in homicides. I heard a Baltimore radio show in 2019 that said pretty much the same thing, highlighted by the police commissioner getting mugged in broad daylight as he was walking down the street with his wife. https://www.usatoday.co…

How does a reduction in police-initiated enforcement actions square with a rise in homicides? Homicide is, pretty much by definition, not a petty crime. Or is this that hoary old "broken windows" theory of policing that's taken such a well-deserved beating over the last couple of decades?

The article also, despite a clear editorial slant, can't quite avoid hinting at the kind of solution that actually does need to happen: not for police officers to simply abrogate the responsibility they accepted with their oaths when the public makes clear their conduct has been unacceptable, but for police officers to improve their conduct, and discharge the responsibility they took on, to actually protect and serve.

I grant that that lies outside the false dichotomy you choose to draw, between police doing nothing and police continuing in the massive abuse of power status quo ante. But, after all, it is a false dichotomy. You can do better.

I hope you can do better, anyway. For one thing, you promoted the deputy police commissioner, which I'm sure he appreciates, and spun the world clear around on its axis so he got mugged in the daytime, when he didn't, instead of at night, when he did. (cf. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/20/us/baltimore-deputy-police-co...)

These are very strange errors of fact to go on making with, it seems like, every single claim you've introduced so far. Wherever you're getting your information from, you might consider finding sources that do a better job of sticking to facts, because whatever you've been using up to now seems not much good at anything beyond leading you into error.

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

#258
post #66
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…

> The more they expect to be held accountable, the more likely they will refrain from violence. The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression for fear of being identified in a protest is marginal, specially during catharsis, otherwise you wouldn't see for instance pe…

> The thing is people are already being held accountable for their skin tone, and the likelihood of changing your behavior when you have lived your entire life in an environment of constant oppression

Actually, a lot more whites are killed by cops than blacks. And before you say that's because there are more white people than black people, blacks represent only 13% of the population but commit 52% of the crime. So, you are less likely to get killed committing a crime as a black person than as a white person.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-amer...

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

#259
post #250
post #239

Really weird that nobody in the thread is pointing out that this is basically a website that says "give me your photos, specifically from protests, which have details that you want to keep private". It doesn't matter that it theoretically all happen in the browser. You can serve different versions to different IPs etc. Every heuristic in me would be screaming don't use that if I would have a need for such tool.

If it's all served in the browser, then simply download the page and use it offline.

I just confirmed the downloaded page works offline

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

#260
post #250
post #239

Really weird that nobody in the thread is pointing out that this is basically a website that says "give me your photos, specifically from protests, which have details that you want to keep private". It doesn't matter that it theoretically all happen in the browser. You can serve different versions to different IPs etc. Every heuristic in me would be screaming don't use that if I would have a need for such tool.

If it's all served in the browser, then simply download the page and use it offline.

In this case thats probably fine. It does remind me of a time when a bitcoin keygen site was declared safe because it didn't make any network requests. Only to find out later that it had a malicious random number generator that generated predictable keys.

In this case its possible that the site encodes the data back in to the image but that seems unlikely.

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