YouTube launches new face-blurring feature to disguise identities
Google (GOOG) on Wednesday announced a new face-blurring tool for its video-sharing website YouTube. The site is the first to roll out such a feature, which is meant to protect the identity of protesters around the world. “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,” Google wrote on its blog. The Internet giant does note, however, that because it is using “emerging technology,” it may sometimes run into problems “detecting faces depending on the angle, lighting, obstructions and video quality,” and “it’s possible that certain faces or frames will not be blurred.”