When censoring information out of pictures, do NOT use the marker tool. Block it out with a full filled in square, or use a mosiac filter. Marker tools are not fully opaque and are slightly off from black, which makes it possible to alter the levels and reveal the information underneath.
This is probably good advice anyway, but to reproduce it, it would be helpful to know what platform, and what exact procedure OP used.
For example, on Android there are separate ‘pen’ and ‘highlighter’ tools, which are confusingly similar. But the highlighter makes a mark which is intentionally translucent, whereas the pen mark appears opaque. In the last screenshot, it looks to me like some lines of text were covered with the pen tool, and are not visible, whereas others were covered with the highlighter tool, used repeatedly, and are still partly visible.
Either way, when combined with the Android crop bug – which in some cases / on some devices failed to actually remove the cropped-out pixels from the image file – I would say you should just never trust phone-app editing software to remove truly secret information from an image.
Tags:
#PSA #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #stalking cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
genuinely friendly reminder to never EVER share someone’s location/information without their explicit permission. you do not know why that person is asking, what they plan to do with that information, or even if the asker has that person’s best interest in mind at all.
OP is also not exaggerating how common this is. my abusive parents successfully kidnapped me from work once because a coworker who didn’t know my situation told them when my next shift was. my parents didn’t even know where I lived at that point in time, which was very much on purpose. it took me days to get away again. ALWAYS tell the person that is being looked for that someone is looking. never share personal information or even how to get in contact them. you can take information in and pass it along, but you absolutely cannot give any out.
[image descriptions: screencap of tweets from rahaeli @rahaeli 7/9/21.
Hello friends, your regular reminder that a not insignificant number of social media “missing person” efforts are actually someone’s abuser trying to get them back, especially with missing older teens. Please don’t share unofficial missing person flyers–
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen a site wide “missing person” turn into the person writing in to ask us to enforce the restraining order, or the custodial parent begging us to shut down the non custodial parent’s attempted kidnapping
Every time I say this, someone says “but what if it’s real, better safe than sorry” and no, it absolutely is not. For a good while I got “this is my abuser, please make them stop” requests for 70-80% of the viral unofficial missing persons crossing my feed.
This number is obviously anecdata–I’ve never been able to find a peer reviewed study attempting to pin down prevalance. But based on those experiences, I absolutely advise never sharing one of those posts.
(I used to finish this PSA thread saying that if a missing person alert came from police or a federal agency, it had likely been screened for abusive tactics and was more likely to be real. I no longer say this.)
This should be your principle for any time someone wants you to connect them with someone else, btw. Never give someone’s info to the person who asked. Tell the asker you’ll give that third party THEIR contact info instead.
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I will probably be muting this in a bit, but some followup: for those questioning “just how often does this happen, even?”, I wasn’t keeping an exact count but I think we just hit double digits of people saying “this happened to me/a friend” in replies to QTs of this
As in, of the current 70 or so quote tweets, around 10% of them have a person telling a story about a time their abuser faked a social media post expressing concern over them as a missing/vulnerable person in order to continue abusing them.
It’s not rare. It’s not unusual. It is, in fact, vastly more common than *any* dangerous situation in which social media attention can do literally anything to improve the situation. (I’ve rarely seen a dangerous situation massive social media attention can improve, honestly.)
To the people who want to argue about this advice: I have, more than once, personally seen an abuser’s viral missing persons post end in suicide or homicide. I have never in 20 years seen a case of stranger kidnapping at all, much less one that’s resolved by virality.
All I’m asking you to understand is that the abusers who do this are very, very good at convincing you their “missing person” is irrational, in danger, or has diminished capacity. You will never be able to spot these situations by reading over a single post. Ever.
If you want to retweet missing personsviral alerts because you want to do good in the world, please understand that there is a much, much greater statistical chance you are *actually* contributing to making things much worse for the person instead. Please just think about that.
And to answer the “well why are you qualified to say this”, since this has gotten way out of my usual circles: hi, I’ve been working trust and safety/ToS on social media for 20 years now. I am never, ever the person with the worst stories when I go out drinking with others.
/end id]
If you’re doubting this the thing you have to remember is that stranger kidnapping is very rare, for either children or adults. The vast majority of the time, when someone is kidnapped or held against their will, it’s by someone they already know, someone close to them: a parent, a partner, that sort of thing. So if someone has been kidnapped or whatever, the people closest to them (who are usually the ones to put up missing posters and whatnot) should be the first suspects, not the last. It’s possible that the person putting up the missing person fliers is the parent who has custody and the noncustodial parent kidnapped the kids … but it’s just as possible that the person putting up fliers is the noncustodial parent who is doing this as part of a plot to find the kids so they can kidnap them. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
And when people choose to leave voluntarily and cut all contact with people close to them, they don’t just do it on a whim. There’s pretty much always a reason. For example, the people they’re cutting contact with might be shitty and abusive. Now, the reason might also be “the person leaving is messed up by drugs” or whatnot, or “they’re being forced by an abuser to cut contact.” Those are also reasons. Buta lot of people who cut contact with someone in their life do it for very good and valid reasons. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
rb this version with image descriptions please
remember this especially now with so many trans and gay people fleeing states that are passing anti lgbtq laws
i guarantee there’s going to be homophobic families saying their “mentally disturbed family member” is missing
Tags:
#PSA #abuse cw #stalking cw #(for those of you who don’t recognise rahaeli‚ she co-founded Dreamwidth) #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Just putting this out there to let people know to watch what they post because you can be found and if you think that the government can’t do this …
Well, you better think again!!
Reminder that in 2017 4chan played capture the flag with Shia LaBeouf. Without any kind of a retail store to use for landmarks they got a rough estimate of the flags location from a livestream. They used the position of the sun to narrow it down to a specific time zone, they tracked the flight paths of planes seen flying overhead to further narrow it down. Then someone in the area drove around honking his horn while viewers on the livestream told him if he was getting closer until he found and stole the flag.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the hacking montage) #fun with loopholes #fun with Google Maps #(mostly fun with OpenStreetMap) #(but it was already a tag) #stalking cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Then, I do nothing else—because I’m a pretty nice dude who is just fascinated by this sort of thing. That said, however, the specific measurements for any common brand of lock can be found online, and, with a little experience, you can hand-file keys in only a few minutes. Just search for “Depth & Space” charts. Those will tell you how far apart to space your cuts and the possible depths you might find cut into that type of key. Note that, while the space and depth will stay consistent across a given brand, it’s up to you to figure out the specific depths for your key.
Seriously guys, stop posting photos of your brand new house key in clear fidelity on multiple social media platforms. People with malicious intentions can easily walk into your no longer secured homes.
This is not a new thing. There was a furor with TSA luggage keys a few years back (last I checked, lockpick and lock enthusiasts have managed to decode and recreate most of the keys except for a couple).
Well, tonight. I leave at 22:00, then I fly to [Stay-Over Country] in the Caribbean. I’ll be stuck in the airport [Stay-Over Country] until for 4hours (until 7:50 the next day). After that, I fly home.
But, on the (literally) bright side, the sun will rise up above the airport at 6:22!
I wonder if that’s enough information to find your flight numbers…hmmm….
I had pretty much the same thought. The conclusion I came to was “Probably, but I would feel like a creep, so I’m not going to do it.”
Tags:
#figuring out people’s unrevealed personal information from their revealed information is a fun puzzle #but I don’t do nearly as much of it as I could because it feels vaguely wrong #reply via reblog
Brinens and Things 