SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — On Wednesday, the encrypted messaging platform Signal announced that, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, the latest version of the smartphone application comes with a face-blurring tool.

As Signal aptly summarised: "2020 is a pretty good year to cover your face,” and that’s true whether you’re participating in the Black Lives Matter protests or simply protecting yourself from the Covid-19 outbreak. For those in the former category, the hyper-secure, end-to-end encryption private messaging service integrated a new tool into its smartphone application that could come in handy. 

The newest version of the app will come with a blurring tool which allows users to easily blur out faces in images or anything else that may need to be hidden. This editing is done "locally on your own device” to ensure user privacy is protected.

When using the tool, it will automatically try to identify all faces in an image and blur them, though the company admits that the results may not always be perfect which is why they also added a manual brush tool.

In addition to this digital face covering, the company stated that they’ll soon "be distributing versatile face coverings to the community free of charge.” The image blurring tool is available in both the Android and iOS versions of Signal’s mobile application. — AFP-Relaxnews