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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
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Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-30)

  • Simon Willison created “Photo Scrubber” to address the ethical concern of sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces.
  • The experimental tool, built with GPT-6 Astra, uses Google’s MediaPipe C++ library (compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision) and the BlazeFace face detection model to locally identify and blur faces.
  • Photo Scrubber also removes metadata, offering a practical way to enhance privacy and anonymity when sharing images, especially those taken in public settings.