An article caught my eye a couple of weeks ago: “YouTube offers facial blurring for Video,” which sounded pretty cool to me initially. In short, people in your videos that wish to remain anonymous, or that you haven’t properly garnered the proper permission for capture, can be blurred out.

There’s an article here which gives an excellent reason for why someone might want to employ this tool simply by showing a before and after photo (without blurring/with blurring) called “Demonstration for Egypt.” YouTube should be proud to be among the first to offer this tool in order to protect anonymity for political safety reasons alone.

I’m sure we can come up with thousands of other reasons why one might want to use the tool. The ability to blur a face at a demonstration could literally make it impossible for the arrest of someone speaking out for human rights, or even save a life. I applaud Google.

The article went on to say, “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.” Those are of course blazingly different scenarios. In no way am I saying that the tool shouldn’t be used to also protect the 8-year old faces, but it reminded me of an article I read back in 2008