Ask HN: What do you think about security camera blurring faces?

3 points by Huongngtm 5y ago ↗ HN

I feel a bit uncomfortable with my face shown in videos captured by my home security cameras. Partly because I am camera shy, and partly due to privacy reason. So I think it would be nice to have my face or certain faces blurred by default in camera footages. This could be done with current technology. I am thinking to develop this feature for the security camera application that I am working on. http://ai-cam.app/

Wanna hear what you think.

2 comments

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maxbaines 5y ago ↗

I feel more uncomfortable with the use of facial recognition technologies, than I do on seeing my own face.

onion2k 5y ago ↗

You need to blur a face in an image a lot to remove enough data that someone can't unblur it again to get enough information to show the image is of a specific person. If you're really worried about privacy you need to actually block out the pixels in the faces to remove anything an ML model could use to reverse the process.

However, there's still a ton of data in a video besides your face. Your gait if you're walking, your height relative to other things in the video, what you're wearing, etc. It can all be used to prove a person in the footage is you.

If you're really concerned about privacy concentrate on making the video data is properly encrypted, or just don't record it in the first place.