YouTube has just introduced face-blurring technology that will enable users to hide their identities in video footage they post online.

The tool, unveiled by Google-owned video website YouTube, will allow human faces to be blurred automatically, and raises the obvious prospect that offences filmed and uploaded might go unpunished.

A blog post on the official YouTube blog explains:

As citizens continue to play a critical role in supplying news and human rights footage from around the world, YouTube is committed to creating even better tools to help them. According to the international human rights organization WITNESS’ Cameras Everywhere report, “No video-sharing site or hardware manufacturer currently offers users the option to blur faces or protect identity.

YouTube is excited to be among the first.

We’re launching face blurring – a new tool that allows you to obscure faces within videos with the click of a button.

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.

There are some obvious examples we can discuss to illustrate the negatives and positives of this like the riots in London last year, and how this technology may help to save lives and deliver messages from countries like Libya, Egypt and Syria.

YouTube continued:

YouTube is proud to be a destination where people worldwide come to share their stories, including activists. The new feature of the video-sharing website will allow users the option to “blur all faces” and hide the identities of those on film.

YouTube will then create an original and a blurred copy of the video and users can decide which to publish. If the unblurred video is deleted, it will be removed from Google’s servers.

Of course, computer forensic science will still play a role in identifying anything illegal.

[Source: YouTube]