Turns out a bit of pixelation won’t cover your back (or front) as it’s actually very easy to de-censor videos

What I’ve found to be a good rule of thumb is this: If I wouldn’t want my kid sister to see it, then I probably shouldn’t put it on the internet. For you, that someone may be a parent or guardian, but after hearing my own mother thoughtfully critique the writing of the Yakuza 0 side story ‘How to train your dominatrix,’ I suspect she’d be surprisingly chill. My kid sister, however, would never let me hear the end of it—and perhaps I’d deserve it too if I thought a mere pixelate filter could conceal my many folders of filthy fanfic.

Jokes aside, it turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to ‘de-censor’ videos these days. Maker Jeff Geerling—of hot dog speaker fame—threw down the gauntlet in a recent video, challenging viewers to reveal the contents of a network share hidden using a pixelating filter, and promising a reward of $50 in return. Well, his viewers delivered—in three slightly different but no less terrifying ways.

While three different folks shared their method, each one relies on a similar principle. Geerling breaks it down, writing, “The idea here is the pixelation is kind of like shutters over a picture. As you move the image beneath, you can peek into different parts of the picture. As long as you have a solid frame of reference, like the window that stays the same size, you can ‘accumulate’ pixel data from the picture underneath.”

With enough of those incomplete snapshots, a sufficiently motivated individual leveraging AI can puzzle-piece-together whatever you were trying to hide with the pixelate filter. Personally, I kind of think of this method like returning the kaleidoscope to its starting position.

Geerling explains that if he hadn’t moved the window containing the censored files around in his original video, it may have been much harder for viewers to decode but not necessarily impossible. Geerling also says that once upon a time you’d need “a supercomputer and a PhD to do this stuff” but with speedy neural networks and AI today, it’s now all too easy for computers to pattern their way through seeming chaos.

So, if the pixelate filter is out, what options are left? For one, Geerling posits that a traditional blur filter may not actually be any safer, electing himself to block out sensitive data in future videos with a completely solid colour layer mask to give neural networks as little image detail to work with as possible.

It’s a very redacted-documents-found-throughout-the-oldest-house vibe, but it may genuinely be safest. Failing that, I’m wondering whether emojis might also be viable—though I’ve no doubt that would’ve made for a very different game take on 2019’s Control.