Tools Archives - Page 5 of 7

Video Advocacy at a Crossroads: 2012’s Dangers & 2013’s Solutions Video is increasingly at the nexus of opportunity and danger for human rights activists. Video helps activists to document, confront, circumvent, and lobby against oppressive authorities—but it also allows those authorities to stalk them. Here's what we think will happen in 2013. WITNESS January 22, 2013
Is This For Real? How InformaCam Improves Verification of Mobile Media Files There is currently a deluge of media coming from the world’s mobile devices for potential use as evidence or trusted sources for journalists. WITNESS and the Guardian Project are working to provide a mechanism, InformaCam, to verify and authenticate this footage. WITNESS January 15, 2013
Blog Action Day: The Power of We at WITNESS We're an organization based on the concept of partnership. In fact, last Thursday we held our annual gala fundraiser in New York City and its theme was "Co-Lab: Celebrating 20 Years of Collaborative Activism." Matisse Bustos Hawkes October 15, 2012
You Are Being Watched: What Faceprints Mean for Generation Y On July 18, YouTube launched a new tool that would enable users to blur the faces in the videos they uploaded, thereby protecting the identities of people featured in them. The platform explicitly identified the human rights threat as a primary motivator for this online technological development. WITNESS August 21, 2012
Tips for Activists Using the YouTube Face Blur Tool Recently, YouTube launched a feature that allows blurring on videos uploaded to their site. It's a step we've pushed for from the commercial video-sharing platforms and social networks - as a way to enable easy, faster, more accessible options for preserving and enabling visual anonymity in a networked, visual age. WITNESS August 7, 2012
Visual Anonymity and YouTube’s New Blurring Tool Today YouTube announced a new tool within their upload editor that enables people to blur the faces within the video, and then publish a version with blurred faces. Sam Gregory July 18, 2012
Happy Father’s Day: How to Be a Human Rights Tech Dad We asked some tech-savvy dads we know to share with us some websites, applications, and tools that they've found useful in day-to-day life but that can also be used in a human rights context. Matisse Bustos Hawkes June 17, 2012
Tactical and Technological Defences For Facial Recognition Technology In my last post I looked at how facial recognition technology (FRT) works, how it's now in our phones, social networks and media management, and how legislators and regulators are reacting to this. But it's also increasingly used by law enforcement and for surveillance of "public" spaces. WITNESS May 18, 2012
Are News Photography Standards Out of Touch With the Cameras Everywhere World We Inhabit? A growing global trend of employing facial recognition technologies (FRTs) has increased risks of compromising the privacy and safety of anyone filmed or photographed, especially in countries with repressive governments. WITNESS May 2, 2012
What Facebook’s Acquisition of Instagram Could Mean for Activists “Conclusion: Occupy Facebook!” A recent analysis of Occupy Wall Street web analytics found that because Facebook users are an engaged community, those who come to www.occupywallst.org from Facebook spend more time on the website and interact with it more. WITNESS April 13, 2012
Thoughts and Reactions on The Atlantic Philanthropies’ Report on Funding Trends in Human Rights and International Justice Many of our donors and peers have been asking for the WITNESS take on the report, “Human Rights and International Justice: Opportunities and Challenges at an Inflection Point,” commissioned by The Atlantic Philanthropies and written by Jonathan Fanton and Zachary Katznelson. Sara Federlein March 29, 2012
WITNESS Enters Knight’s #NewsChallenge With SecureSmartCam App We’ve entered the Knight Foundation News Challenge with the SecureSmartCam (SSC), our collaboration with The Guardian Project. WITNESS March 22, 2012
WITNESS, Technology and #Video4Change at #SXSW WITNESS is at #SXSWInteractive, one of the world's largest conferences focused on interactive technologies and online innovation. Sam Gregory March 10, 2012
The Ethics of Face Recognition Technology At SXSW next week, WITNESS is running a workshop on the ethics of facial recognition. It’s an issue we've talked about before – most recently in the Cameras Everywhere report, and with the ObscuraCam Android app. WITNESS March 7, 2012
Universal Subtitles Video Editing Workflow: Working With the Subtitle Track Universal Subtitles is an online subtitling/captioning tool for web videos. My colleague Bryan Nunez commented on the potential uses of the service in this post. Martin Tzanev February 14, 2012