On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Matisse Bustos Hawkes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello all, > I'm sure some of you saw today's news that YouTube announced a new face blur > tool into their editing suite - as they put it: "Whether you you want to > share sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces of the activists > involved,
I wonder if they make timepieces which can measure timespans short enough to clock the amount of time between publication of the announcement and the arrival of the national security letters (and equivalents from the other nations google has physical presence in) requiring google to secretly record and indefinitely retain any of the originals which have been marked for "deletion". I think it's good to hear that people are thinking of this, but unfortunate to see that tools like this from institutions and in forms which are structurally incapable of keeping their word, though no fault of their own. Trust should come from promises which can't be broken whenever possible, and in the case of anonymizing video we can do a lot better than cloud hosted SaaS in that regard, especially when they are specifically marketed as being for activism. Youtube could opt not to provide this feature and to leave more room for tools which run entirely under the user's control, but now that they provide it they'll likely not be able to turn it off when its starts being used in a manner which is contrary to human rights. I understand that tool accessibility is also very important, but bad technology crowds out good and anonymity tools which are centralized and deeply and fundamentally unauditable are most certainly the bad kind, even if they were made with the best intentions. I think youtube should reconsider how they're representing this tool and take the opportunity to also recommend some non-SaaS audited tools which can't so easily be secretly compromised. _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list [email protected] Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech
