Penciling: An Anonymization Method for Social Media Images

Abstract

Penciling, a technique used to anonymize images for both human and machine vision, offers an opportunity to reduce technical traceability and retain visual data for online and social media research contexts. Drawing on methods for creating composite narrative and visual accounts to preserve participant anonymity, penciling enables researchers to edit images across a spectrum from photo-like quality to pencil sketch dependent on their ethical and methodological needs. Further, penciling reduces recognition to the naked eye and renders the image completely unrecognizable to search engine queries. We describe tested procedures for employing penciling and address benefits and challenges of the technique.