YouTube is offering a new tool that will protect the identity and location of individuals featured on YouTube videos by blurring their faces and other information.

According to Chris Claburn, a writer for InformationWeek Security, YouTube decided to release this technology in “An effort to serve the human rights community and to address privacy complaints from people featured without permission in other people’s videos.”

The following YouTube video will show you how you can blur out peoples faces in videos and make them anonymous:

After you have your footage the first thing that you will need is a converter program called Format Factory that you can download for free here. This will convert the audio and video into the appropriate formats.

Once you have completed the necessary steps in Format Factory you will move on to change the pitch of the audio track by using Audacity which is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.

After you have successfully altered the pitch you will need to access Wax 2.0, a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software that you will use to edit the audio file.

The process might seem overwhelming at first but the value and importance of protecting certain information may make it well worth the effort.

YouTube plans on adding a blurring tool to its video editing toolkit in the near future. This would make the blurring process faster because users would not have to use the software programs that I listed above.

Do you think this tool will motivate people to become more open about the issues that they face?