Blur and hide in photos
Hide faces, car number plates, ID numbers and addresses before you share a photo. Draw a box or paint over them, then download a clean copy.
How to hide
The download is a brand-new image file, so the hidden details in the original (EXIF), such as the GPS location and phone model, are left out. The picture itself can still give clues: a street sign, a view from a window. See what a photo gives away
Everything happens on your device. Your photo is not uploaded or saved anywhere.
Hide it properly
Blurred or pixelated text can sometimes be worked out again: researchers have rebuilt pixelated words with free tools. A solid box leaves nothing to recover. Use it for Emirates ID numbers, passport numbers, plates, card numbers and addresses.
Go a little past the edges. Check the reflections too: a car plate in a shop window, a screen behind someone, a name on a uniform.
In the UAE, taking or posting someone's photo without their permission can break the privacy law. Hide faces of strangers and children before you post.
Send the downloaded file, not the original. Some apps keep the original in your gallery or in a chat backup: delete it if you don't need it.
Sources: Bishop Fox, "Unredacter" (February 2022), an open tool showing that pixelated text can be recovered, as reported by BleepingComputer and The Hacker News; Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021 on Combating Rumours and Cybercrimes, Article 44 (taking, keeping or publishing images of others without consent: at least 6 months in prison and/or a fine of AED 150,000 to 500,000), as explained by Gulf News (December 2023). Face finding uses the browser's own Shape Detection API (FaceDetector, a W3C community draft) only where the browser offers it: nothing is downloaded or sent. Re-encoding: the WHATWG HTML standard's canvas toBlob() makes a new file without the original's EXIF tags (CIPA DC-008); we checked that a test photo with GPS and camera tags comes out with none of them. Big photos are reduced to 4,000 pixels on the longest side.