- Reporting Ethically on Domestic and Gender-Based Violence We share tips for journalists who may be reporting on the issues of domestic violence and gender-based violence for the first time.
- 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.
- 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.
- Promoting Cameras Everywhere Recommendations at RightsCon and Stanford University This week, WITNESS is busy in the Bay Area of California where we'll be at multiple public meetings discussing ideas in our Cameras Everywhere leadership initiative. We're speaking on a panel at the first Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, attending the first advisory board meeting of the exciting new EngineRoom initiative, and we're presenting at Stanford University's Liberation Technology Seminar on the "Cameras Everywhere" report and the tools we're developing in WITNESS Labs.
- Setting a Global Standard for Human Rights and Technology Companies In a world with more than five billion mobile phone subscribers and where 48 hours of video footage is being uploaded to YouTube every minute, the challenges navigating the nexus of human rights and technology are too complicated for any single company or human rights activist to manage on their own.
- New Report Makes Recommendations for How to Enhance Potential of Human Rights Video I'm pleased to announce the launch of our new report: "Cameras Everywhere: Current Challenges and Opportunities at the Intersection of Human Rights, Video and Technology." You can read and download it on our website.
- ObscuraCam v1: A Mobile App for Visual Privacy Last week we, along with our our friends and colleagues at the Guardian Project, released the first public beta app from the SecureSmartCam project. ObscuraCam, an Android camera phone application is the result of a 7 month long collaboration between WITNESS and The Guardian Project.
- Human Rights Video, Privacy and Visual Anonymity in the Facebook Age The successful nationwide organizing and subsequent protests in Egypt to oust the 30-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak have in part been facilitated by Facebook. But as media and technology commentators and human rights activists alike are noting, using Facebook for activism is fraught with risks.
