Many consider it vital to obscure the faces of people in any photos you may post on social media and other online sources. As a result, authorities may collect and use that information to track movements during covid-19 social distancing.

You can open up your images on a desktop or laptop using Photoshop or preview to blur or scrub. But we’re going to assume you are n’t carrying around a laptop with you.

It is possible to de-blur a photo, especially using neural networks. It’s not possible to completely reverse the blurring, since it is lossy. So why take the risk?.

You also want to remove any and all metadata from your images. They can carry GPS location, timestamps, and details about the type of phone used.

There are a plethora of apps that will help blur or cover faces and remove metadata for both iOS and Android devices. Here are ways you can do both without using a third-party app.

On iOS, open photos, tap on your photo and select the edit option. Tap on the three dots in that same corner to access markup. With that, create solid circles or squares to block out faces.

Android also has a native markup tool – in the photos app, select the photo, tap on the edit tool and choose markup. You can then use the center-bottom pen tool to scribble over anything you want to cover.

When you take a photo on your device, Meta is going to be attached automatically. The easiest way to avoid this is to take screenshots of your photos so that meta and geotagging wo n’t carry over.

Instead of just using the camera app, start a screen record while you’re making your video, and use that recording instead.

If you have an LG or Samsung Android phone, you may also have a built-in screen recorder. Look for it in your quick settings shade by swiping down twice from the top.

Recently, there have been a plethora of apps that will help hide faces and remove metadata for both iOS and Android devices. You may find it easier to use one of these apps.

Signal has announced a new face-blurring tool that will be incorporated into the latest Android and iOS versions of the software.

There are also grassroots efforts like image scrubber. You can use in a browser on your device to upload images to blur and scrub. Then save the anonymous version back to your device.

Apps like glitche and glitch lab let you Pixelate over selected areas. trigraphy lets you create mosaic effects.