YouTube Debuts Automated Face Blurring Technology

Contrary to Mark Zuckerberg's beliefs, there still is a place for privacy in our day and age. If anything, there's a greater need for it as it's becoming harder and harder to stay anonymous. YouTube is introducing one way of dealing with the an increasingly-exposed world, by enabling users to blur faces in videos.

The feature comes in very handy for citizen journalists, but also for anyone wanting to put up videos shot in the public, but keep some of the people in them, who may or may not have wanted to be there, anonymous.

"Whether you want to share sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces of the activists involved, or share the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game without broadcasting the children’s faces to the world, our face blurring technology is a first step towards providing visual anonymity for video on YouTube," YouTube explained.

The feature is available in the YouTube video editor. In the "Additional Features" section, you'll see the "Blur All Faces" option. Just click the "Apply" button and let Google's technology do the rest. Google has plenty of experience with this type of technology, granted for photos only, thanks to its Street View project.

But no technology is perfect, which is why YouTube warns that there may be omissions. At the very least, you should check the video before posting it to see whether the technology has done its job. If it missed something and if privacy is really important, it's best just to leave the video private.

"This is emerging technology, which means it sometimes has difficulty detecting faces depending on the angle, lighting, obstructions and video quality. It’s possible that certain faces or frames will not be blurred," YouTube warned.

"YouTube is proud to be a destination where people worldwide come to share their stories, including activists. Along with efforts like the Human Rights Channel and Citizentube that curate these voices, we hope that the new technologies we’re rolling out will facilitate the sharing of even more stories on our platform," it concluded.