Anonymous Camera app automatically blurs faces out of protest photos

Blurring a protester’s face in a photo can save them from harassment later on. Thanks to a new iPhone app, that’s incredibly easy to do. 

Aptly called Anonymous Camera, the new camera app from Playground.AI is available on the App Store for free. It uses machine learning to automatically blur out the faces of people in photos and videos you capture with the app. The best part is everything happens locally on your device; nothing ever goes to the cloud, with the App Store description daring you to try it in airplane mode.

Faces can be blocked with solid circles, static noise, or a blur effect. If you have an iPhone XS or better, you can block out full bodies. Swipe up from the camera view to reveal the options, including the ability to scrub metadata from your photos or videos. That’ll make it harder for people to reverse engineer location or timestamp data from photos posted on social media.

Last but not least, there’s a $1.99 price point for a “Pro” version that lets you remove the automatic watermark from your photos. Pro users can also choose to only anonymize parts of the screen instead of the whole screen. 

This is just one of a few easy ways to blur out faces in protest photos. You should at least consider doing that if you snap pictures at protests and want to post them on social media, if only to protect people from the possibility of retaliation. You never know who is looking at your posts.