Blog owner here. You're welcome to unblur it: I swapped the number out in the screenshot for one of Ofcom's list of official never-to-be-assigned telephone numbers for drama (e.g. film & TV) use (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...) before I applied the blur.

That number isn't mine, and will never belong to anybody!

Then why bother to blur it?

To indicate to the reader that the information represented by this area of the image should be considered private.

It's like how they blur nipples on TV. We all know what nipples look like! But they're blurred to say "yeah, but maybe you shouldn't be looking".

That serves a purpose. This is more like choosing abstinence as a form of birth control but wearing a condom anyway.

Yeah, it was a bad metaphor. I was sleepy.

Blurring makes sense as a way to say "this is private". It's almost lampshading, in this case, because it's the bit I want you to look at!

But blurring doesn't make sense from a privacy perspective, because unblurring is pretty easy. So I modified the number to a known-fake, will-never-be-valid one.

But if I just did that, people would probably try to call it, or would say "but you've put it back online here", or similar. Or else would say "that number's fake anyway, why are you worried?". Blurring it as well achieved the best of all worlds: it lampshades the bit I'm talking about, and it indicates that the kind of data stored there should be considered private, and it prevents the actual extraction of the (real) private data from the image. Win, win, win.

Unless the question "why bother" was to imply that blurring was hard to do? Because it definitely wasn't. Changing the number took much more effort! The blur was just two clicks; significantly less effort than, say, explaining why I chose to do so! :-D

Ahhh, that's a cheeky move :)

Love it.

Often I'm lazy and just black out revealing information, like I did in my blog post about how British Gas can't understand my name (https://danq.me/it-is-only-q).

But sometimes I've done the same thing in other places and gone further, sometimes concealing "fun" messages. In my post about Halifax putting the wrong names on a letter to me (https://danq.me/halifax-dun-goofed), I changed my address to a message along the lines of "what, you think I'd put my actual address here, like it's my first day on the Internet" and then blurred that.

Incidentally, I think that one was the first times that anybody contacted me to say that they'd noticed the unblurrability of my images, but I've been using this approach for years!

Definitely readable. A stronger blur would not have helped the situation either. It is absolutely insane how well information from a blurred image can be reconstructed. For example, consider the "Data" column of the following image, which basically looks like a gray image without any content, but neural networks can recover most of the blurred characters: https://fips.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/HDC_result_exampl...

Algorithms can see the difference between RGB 245, 245, 245 and RGB 246, 245, 245 (it's 1, 0, 0) but the eye can probably not, also depending on the monitor hardware. Thus the blurring effect might not be as strong as it looks like at first glance.

The person who posted it has said elsewhere here that the number is faked.

And yes, your comments re blur have plenty of precedent.

It looks like it's a fake number anyway as it's 07700 987654

There are computer techniques that can be used to de-blur sensitive information, so the expert advice is not to use simple blurring effects.

But in this instance, it’s trivially easy to read the numbers even without any fancy software.

@author, if your reason for blurring was to protect your identity, then you should update that image asap because you’re not succeeding at hiding your number.

I heard new AI crawlers extract text from images too, hoping to get that extra dataset. So with that kind of blur, it might end up in LLMs.