Have you ever had a crazy weekend, or a wild night out with the boys/girls and wake up the next morning to find twenty photos of you that have been tagged on Facebook? Untagging yourself might work, assuming of course that no one has seen them already. For certain employers, maintaining a proper and “clean” image of yourself on a social network is a must, since it sort of reflects the company’s image as well, which is why you may notice some of your friends get extremely agitated when you upload “compromising” photos of them on social networking websites.
Enter the ObscuraCam, which is a new Android application that was developed as a joint project between Guardian Project and NGO WITNESS. The app probably wasn’t designed to help you obscure your face on photographs after a weekend of partying, but rather it was developed in order to raise awareness of photo privacy.
How the app works is that it supposedly strips off all the EXIF metadata in the photographs, i.e. GPS location, time stamps, dates, camera model, etc. The app is also reported to make use of Android’s built-in Face Detection library and algorithm to automatically find faces for blurring, although we’re not sure how precise it can be. We’re also guessing there’s also a manual method that you will be able to use, and supposedly you will be able to pixel-blur faces or cover faces with giant Groucho Marx glasses. There are probably more noble uses for this app but for now, blurring out our faces in “compromising” photographs during a party is good enough reason to get it.