An excerpt from the Google blog post
YouTube is proud to be a place where citizens and activists come to tell their stories -- stories that may otherwise go unnoticed. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that YouTube is a top destination for news and that “citizens play a substantial role in supplying and producing footage.”
But this level of exposure can be risky to the citizens shooting the footage and the people who appear in their videos.
Today, we announced a new face blurring tool that represents a first step toward providing visual anonymity in video.
Read the rest at Google Blog.
This is explained from YouTube's POV at the YouTube blog.
Excerpt here -
Blurring faces on YouTube is simple. Once you’ve chosen the video that you’d like to edit within our Video Enhancements tool, go to Additional Features and click the “Apply” button below Blur All Faces. Before you publish, you will see a preview of what your video will look like with faces blurred. When you save the changes to your video, a new copy is created with the blurred faces. You will then be given the option to delete the original video.
I can only say this is a two edged sword. It could be protecting the innocent, but it could also prevent the guilty from deserving punishment.
To each his own…,
