The latest version of Signal for Android and iOS introduces a new blur feature in the image editor that is designed to help protect the privacy of the people in photos shared over the application, Signal has announced.
The US giant announced a change in its much-used application after a series of protests against police brutality in the US that then spread around the world, following the police killing of African American George Flloyd, and more recently, of Breonna Taylor.
‘’Now it’s easy to give every face a hiding place, or draw a fuzzy trace over something you want to erase. Simply tap on the new blur tool icon to get started,” Signal says.
The update has already been submitted to app stores, and is expected in the coming days. The new feature leverages the latest system and platform-level libraries for Android and iOS. In order to maintain privacy, all of the processing happens locally on users’ own devices.
These system libraries are not perfect and don’t detect every face 100 per cent of the time. These flaws and potential biases mean that it is important to extend their default functionality so that users can always draw with the blur brush to manually obscure additional faces or areas in a photo.