YouTube: faces blurred out

Google’s online video sharing platform is now offering a tool that allows you to blur faces with a single click.

With Google products, the face blurring technology is already widely used by Google Maps Street View service. This service has now been deployed to YouTube. Users and contributors to the platform can now apply face blurring to their own videos.

The blurring is one of the video editing features available. Another button (other options below the video) is also made available to blur faces, allowing people in the video to remain anonymous. A sample is provided before recording, with it being possible to delete the original video after the changes have been made.

An algorithm analyses the video and detects facial characteristics like eyes. The blurring is applied by pixelating and blurring the detected traits.

The effectiveness of the technology is still a little random though. It is presented as "emerging" with some difficulties encountered when detecting the faces depending on the angle, the lighting and video quality. If the final results aren’t satisfactory, YouTube recommends keeping your video private.

"Visual anonymity in the videos will allow users to share a greater number of personal videos that they previously couldn’t do", declares Amanda Conway, a political associate at YouTube.

YouTube is particularly thinking about news events where the publishing of people’s faces can lead to them being beaten in some countries.

At the same time, blurring people’s faces also helps reduce privacy concerns. One thing is sure though, and that’s if users start to use blurring on a wide scale, YouTube’s videos will start to look funny.