How to hide faces and scrub metadata when you photograph a protest

While showing up at a protest can demonstrate your opinion to the world, you may not want your face — or the faces of other protesters — to be included, especially when there is the possibility that authorities will collect and use that information (as they did for tracking movements during COVID-19 social distancing). As a result, many consider it vital to obscure the faces of people in any photos you may post on social media and other online sources.

What follows are some strategies for removing facial features from your photos. Of course, you can open up your images on a desktop or laptop using Photoshop or Preview to blur or scrub, but we’re going to assume you aren’t carrying around a laptop with you. So with mobile in mind, you still have some solid options.

When removing faces, you want to use a method that can’t be reversed. It is possible to de-blur a photo, especially using neural networks. It’s not possible to completely reverse the blurring, since it is lossy (in other words, some data will be permanently lost), but a lot can be “restored.” So why take the risk? Painting over faces, or using mosaic blur techniques, will prevent …

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