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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

First of all, very cool little tool. I always suspected you could do this but it's really neat to watch it go.

But now just in response to the title... does anybody ever use pixelation as a redaction technique?

I feel like I've only ever seen pixelation for censoring nudity or a brand name or face or something. Actual redaction of text truly meant to be kept secret, I've only ever seen as black bars.

Are there notable cases where people have genuinely tried to redact something secret using pixelation?

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Bear in mind that "redaction" just means any effort to protect sensitive information by obscuring text. I don't think I've seen pixelation used to redact text in any corporate/governmental context, but I've definitely seen people use it on sites like Reddit or Twitter to try to hide their name or other info.

I've also seen people try to redact sensitive information by poorly scribbling it out using the pencil tool on their phone, leaving enough parts of letters visible to guess what was originally there, or try to "black out" text using a brush that wasn't fully opaque, allowing it to be revealed by adjusting the contrast. Basically, a lot of people don't know how to safely redact stuff.

I don't think pixelation is commonly used because most people probably don't know how to use it, but my Samsung phone's built-in image editor also has a pixelation feature, so I honestly expect to see it pop up more often in the future.

This is somewhere the simplicity of old MS paint and BMPs was great:

A colored square is easy — and destructively removes what was there, by setting that part of the image to a chosen color.

I've seen once or twice people admitting to doing this deliberately to get around brigading/doxxing rules when they actually do want to share the username or whatever - not sure if it's allowed because "they tried" or because it's difficult enough to read that still stops most of the brigading (in many cases you can probably just search for the content to get the username anyway, if you care enough)

I've often seen pixelated text in AWS documentation screenshots and third-party tutorials. Not for anything truly critical like secret keys, but mostly for things like account ID numbers, where the exposure of it could potentially have a small impact.

questionable pentesting firms use it on their reports for critical info

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