[Ssc-dev] draft blog post

[Nathan of Guardian]

We are waiting to publish this, but we've mostly got the text down for
our V1 announce blog post. The actual post has lots of pretty pictures,
links and formatting, but here is the raw text below.

Comments are welcome!

****
We're very happy to announce the beta release of ObscuraCam for Android.
This is the first release from the SecureSmartCam project, a partnership
with Witness.org, a leading human rights video advocacy and training
organization. This is the result of an open-source development cycle,
comprised of multiple sprints (and branches), that took place over the
last five months. This "v1" release is just the first step towards the
complete vision of the project.

Our collective goal is to design a new type of smartphone camera app,
that makes it simple for the user to respect the Visual Privacy (more on
this below...) of the people they are photographing or recording, while
also increasing their own ability to control the personally identifiable
data stored inside of that photo or video. Also, we think an app that
allows you to pixelize your friends, disguise their faces and otherwise
defend their privacy just a little bit, is a lot of fun and helps raise
awareness about an important issue.



Quick Download Links

 For those of you who just want to get to it, head over to the Android
Market to grab the latest version of the app. You can also scan the QR
code to the left, and it will take you in that direction.

For those without access to the Android Market, you can also grab the
ObscuraCam.APK file from our public builds folder. Be sure to check back
for updates, because it will not auto-update itself.


The "Cameras Everywhere" Initiative

In January, Witness launched their Cameras Everywhere initiative, in
which they ask themselves:

As more and more people film people speaking out and taking a stand
against human rights crises, how can we protect victims and witnesses
and ensure informed consent as much as possible? As more and more
footage circulates from human rights crises around the world, how does
powerful footage reach audiences in comprehensible ways that move people
to action? And how do we know how to trust that footage?

...

Critical issues to address in this realm include safety and security in
the use of video; ethical questions raised by the widespread capacity to
shoot and circulate human rights video; challenges around the
authenticity of video and the preservation of evidence; and the need for
effective documentation around the use of video in advocacy.

Through our collaboration, Witness has decided to move beyond just
awarness, training and advocacy, and instead actual help design a next
generation of Camera app software, that is not just intended to share
more, and capture more, but is meant to allow its operator to stop,
think and be empowered to control the media they are capturing.

A Primer on Visual Privacy

As Wikipedia puts it, Visual Privacy is the relationship between
collection and dissemination of visual information, the public
expectation of privacy, and the legal issues surrounding them. It
relates particularly to the increasing presence of large-scale still-
and video-camera networks in everyday life. The combination of
escalating security concerns of corporations and governments, coupled
with the increasing affordability of electronic surveillance equipment,
has resulted in a proliferation of such networks. Simultaneously, face
detection and recognition technologies have improved considerably while
policy regarding the privacy and fair usage of such systems, as well as
the rights of those imaged by such systems, are topics that have not yet
been resolved.

Some examples where visual privacy is being diluted in the name of
features or security:

Facebook's opt-out feature for auto-detection and tagging of faces
British Columbia's privacy watchdog OKs the use of facial recognition
technology to identify rioters from video and still images of
Vancouver's 2011 hockey riots.
Viewdle's Social Camera automatically tags your friends in photos based
on the social networking profile pictures they have published
While these examples might seem harmless to some, or a useful feature
for law enforcement to others, the main issue is that the subjects of
these photos and scans, are never asked if they wish to participate in
them, not to mention whether they want their photo published online in
the first place.

How ObscuraCam Helps

Part of the problem currently surrounding visual privacy is the fact
that many of the tools and applications that people use on an everyday
basis do not have features built in to protect privacy. As a result,
everyone with a smartphone, tablet or laptop - not to mention an actual
video camera! - captures raw, unedited content that exposes the
identities of participants and bystanders present at sensitive events or
activities.

ObscuraCam is a mobile application for Android that makes it easy for
anyone to protect the identity of individuals or groups represented in
their photos by building obfuscation and redaction directly into the
app. It can be used on photos taken directly from the app itself, or on
any photo that your mobile device has access to, including local memory
card images or linked Picasa albums. By moving a usually cumbersome
post-production process into the daily workflow of those capturing
sensitive images, it's our hope that visual privacy will be respected
when it really matters.

Using ObscuraCam

ObscuraCam features a simple, touch-based user interface for easy
manipulation and redaction of images, as well as an automated removal of
identifying metadata stored in the photo itself. The following steps
walk through the process of capturing and sharing an obscured photo
using ObscuraCam.

>From the application home page, choose to either capture a new image or
choose an existing image from your existing collections. These options
just launch your standard Camera and Gallery application. When the photo
is imported, identifying EXIF metadata stored in the file itself, such
as GPS location, camera make and model or timestamp, will be removed.
After you capture or open an image with ObscuraCam, it is automatically
scanned to detect faces. Any faces detected are marked as tagged regions
in an image, and the user is able to create as many additional tagged
regions as they wish - either via the menu or by long-pressing the
desired region. By default, tagged regions are set to be obscured via
pixelation.
Once a tagged region has been created, the user can interact with that
region by simply touching it to bring up a contextual menu.
Options available from the contextual tagging menu include:
Edit - select to scale and move tagged regions
Redact - select to fully redact tagged region and replace with black space
Pixelate - select to selectively obfuscate identities of persons or
situations
bgPixelate - select to easily obfuscate everything BUT the tagged region
Mask - select to pin a set of 'groucho marks' glasses on the tagged
region - not only a bit of fun, but useful for quickly defeating facial
recognition schemes.
Delete - delete the current tagged region
Once you're done selecting and obfuscating tagged regions, you can use
the options from the main application menu to see a preview of the
finished image, save it to your local memory, or share the picture with
any application on your handset that is configured to accept images.
This includes applications like Facebook, Twitter, or the default
Messaging app.
Share With Us and "Save Your Face"!

As impediments of visual privacy continue to expand, help us get the
word out that we can take back control over our online identities with
ObscuraCam! We've set up a Facebook Page where you can share your
creations with us, and with eachother!

Source Code & Issue Reporting

We're big fans of open source and living in public. As consistent with
all our projects, source code for the SecureSmartCam project, along with
the ObscuraCam release, is available online at GitHub.

We also use GitHub to manage our development milestones and active bugs
/ issues. If you encounter any bugs or issues when testing out this beta
build, please report them directly to us in the comments below or by
filing directly on the Issues page.