How to Protect Protesters in Your Photos and Videos

Simple tools to obscure faces, and erase metadata

A protestor records people spray painting the CNN logo during a demonstration in Atlanta, Georgia, in response to the police custody murder of George Floyd, on May 29, 2020. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Stringer/Getty Images

More than ever, it seems, people are mindful of how sharing and disseminating images can lead to their identification and prosecution of protesters by law enforcement. In an increasing number of these photos, participants are being digitally anonymized, with their faces, shoes, and clothing logos all blurred out.

But blurring images or otherwise obscuring the subject of a photograph may not always be enough to avoid detection, particularly if a smartphone with the unedited photos is seized by law enforcement. Original images come with metadata that may contain timestamps and location information related to when and where the photo was taken. Such information could be used by police to link protesters to particular places at specific moments.

The Age of the Anonymous Protest Is Over

Software artist Everest Pipkin’s Image Scrubber is a free-to-use tool which enables users to quickly and effectively blur an image while also erasing key identifying metadata. Similar to Microsoft Paint, it’s intuitive to…