Blurring sensitive information no longer keeps it safe on the Internet

Blurring sensitive information no longer keeps it safe on the Internet

We have long relied upon simple image manipulation like blurring and pixelation to obscure sensitive information on the internet, but that may not work for much longer. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech have developed a machine learning system that can identify faces and text in images with alarming accuracy. And it wasn’t even very hard to do. The premise of blurring and pixelation comes from a very human perspective. If we can’t see through the filter, it’s considered good enough. Humans are no longer the pattern recognition champions, though. The researchers trained a neural network with images of faces and text and found it could often correctly identify the images again after they had been obfuscated with three different techniques — YouTube’s proprietary blur tool,…


Link to Full Article: Blurring sensitive information no longer keeps it safe on the Internet