Security News > 2020 > June > Signal goes Gaussian to take privacy to the next level: All your faces don't belong to us

Amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, secure comms biz Signal has deployed a blur tool in its messaging and calling app to allow users to obscure faces in app-captured snapshots.

Since not everyone always does so, the latest versions of Signal for Android and iOS include a blur feature in the image editor menu that can be used to degrade image details.

Tapping on the blur menu button allows you to draw over an image with a blurred stroke and loads a radio button atop the image that, when selected, automatically tries to find faces in the image to overlay them with a blurred box.

Blurring should be thought of mainly as a privacy courtesy than as a serious security mechanism.

Signal's blur tool may be worthwhile to de-identify distant faces captured in a crowd scene but it's unlikely to be enough to prevent a closeup in good lighting from being recognizable.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/06/05/signal_blur_tool/