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14 minute read

February 12, 2025, 2:38 PM

One of the things that has bothered me about online content for a while is when people will redact portions of an image whether it needs it or not, often the faces of bystanders, license plates, or otherwise.  They’ll do it either by the electronic equivalent of scribbling something out like one might do with a pen on a physical image, or by placing goofy oversized emojis over people’s faces.  The problem with this behavior is that it draws attention to the very thing that the people doing the redacting are ostensibly trying to make disappear.  In other words, these various redactions draw the focus off of whatever the person wants us to see, and the first thing we notice is this big smear of color that shouldn’t be there.

While this behavior has annoyed me for quite a while, there was recently some discussion in a group of fire alarm nuts that I’m part of after I posted a photo of the alarms in my old elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas.  Late one night, I decided I wanted to check up on Grimes and see how they were doing.  No one that worked there when I attended is still there, and that’s been the case for a while (and I suspect that a lot of the present-day teachers there are younger than me), so I really was just checking on the building itself, since I don’t know anyone in any of the photos.  So I went to their Facebook page and went for a dive.  I commented on a few photos.  One photo that I commented on was about the spelling bee, about how I had done the same thing on that same stage three decades prior.  Another one was about the addition of a second set of glass doors at the main entrance to form a vestibule.  There was no vestibule in the front before.  Just go through the front door and that was it.  I also commented on a photo showing a metal play dome on the playground, mentioning that it was installed when I was a student there in the early nineties and that I was glad that it was still in use, and also about the absence of a wooden play structure next to it that they had built later.  All in all, I had a good time doing a virtual visit back to my old elementary school.  Based on the photos, the school has been maintained very well over the years.  The walls have been painted, and the floors have been replaced, but the place looks amazing, and does not look like a 38-year-old school.  My middle and high schools looked far worse back when I attended those schools than Grimes does today, and those schools were half of Grimes’ current age.  I also checked up on the fire alarm system, and found, to my dismay, that Grimes finally got a new fire alarm system last summer, and so the Wheelock 7002Ts of my childhood are gone.  Though I’ll say that 37 years is a pretty good run for a fire alarm system.  It served the school well, and so while I was sad to discover that the alarms that I knew were not there anymore, that old system had more than done its job, keeping thousands of students safe and announcing the start of hundreds of fire drills over the years.

First of all, for those wondering, this is what existed before, from photos on Grimes’ Facebook page:

Basically, the pull stations were Fire-Lite BG-10s, and the notification appliances were Wheelock 7002Ts.  Truth be told, the reason why I checked up on the school at all was to see if the BG-10s were still there following Honeywell’s issuing a memo in 2013 regarding a bad seal on BG-10 pull stations, with the recommended solution’s being to replace the BG-10 pull stations with newer BG-12 models in lieu of repairing them.  As a result of this, the BG-10 became a rare model to find in the field practically overnight, as most BG-10s were replaced by BG-12s.  The BG-10s at Grimes were older than the date range given in the memo, but who knows – they might have been replaced by BG-12s all the same.  Turns out that they weren’t, but it appears, based on the photo, that they did replace the screw in the top of the station at some point (here is another example of this aftermarket modification).

Then in more recent photos, the fire alarms looked like this:

What you are seeing is BG-12s in the back right of the corridor in that left photo (look carefully) replacing the BG-10s, and System Sensor L Series LED horn/strobes replacing the 7002Ts in the right photo.  The general signaling bells, which were used to signal the start and end of the school day, as well as lunch periods, are still the original Faraday bells.  Makes you wonder if that one oddball bell is still there outside of room 11.  That particular bell was different from the others from day one, and I never knew why.

When I was initially looking for my 7002Ts, I knew exactly where they should have been, and to my surprise, they weren’t there.  I wasn’t sure what had replaced them, though, because they looked flat and similar in color to the wall.  It made me wonder if they had been removed and plated over, so I started skimming over the ceiling looking for alarms.  Not finding any, I looked at more photos, and that’s when I realized that they had put new horn/strobes in the same places.  From the looks of it, they didn’t pepper the place with fire alarms like you often see in schools nowadays, but it seems like they just did one-for-one replacements, where they replaced the panel, the pull stations, and the notification appliances with new equipment in the same spots, with maybe one or two new devices as necessary for proper coverage.

So, you’re probably thinking, what does this have to do with redacting things online?  Stay with me – I’m getting there.  After doing my virtual visit to my old elementary school, I took a zoomed-in screencap of the photo of the BG-10 and posted it to the aforementioned fire alarm group:

I captioned it, “I was surprised to find out via a dig through social media posts that my old elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas, still had its original BG-10 pull stations as recently as 2023, though they had replaced the screw in the top.”  I then went on to explain that the original fire alarm system had been replaced over the summer.

Most responses were typical for a group of fire alarm nuts.  One pointed out that the new pull stations were BG-12s, which I had initially missed.  Another expressed sympathy, and spoke about how they felt when their own school’s alarm system had been replaced long after they had graduated.  A few comments discussed the memo regarding the repair/replacement of the BG-10 model, as well as the aftermarket screw modification.

Then one comment came from a person named Robert Alexander Aslin.  He said:

I have never understood the concern that some people have on the Internet about maintaining the anonymity of strangers.  Someone makes some weird post, and someone downstream redacts the name of the person who posted it when sharing it around.  I find it pretty ridiculous because it’s typically a trivial matter to locate the original source and find out who originally made it, often by searching a string of words from the content.  My usual stance is, if the person posted it under their name, then they must be proud of it, so why are we denying them the proper credit for their work?  I’ve been following that philosophy for a very long time, with the crazy pizza lady’s probably being the most prominent example of this, where all of her recorded communications were posted in their entirety, fully unredacted.  I had a former coworker practically beg me to redact some of the information there, and I said absolutely not.  The person did it, and I was holding them responsible for it.  But this instance wasn’t nearly as vindictive as the post about the pizza lady.  This wasn’t about putting someone’s bad behavior on display, but rather, this was “look at the alarms in my old school” with a friendly audience.

Then in this instance, there is an additional wrinkle: I am not the original source of the content.  I was resharing content that was previously posted in a public location.  The Facebook page for Grimes Elementary is 100% public for anyone to see.  Nothing that I had shared in the fire alarm group was original content other than my text caption.  You want to see it in its original context?  It’s right here.  So there’s really no point to redacting anything on that point alone, since the original content is already out there for everyone to see, and in the context that I shared it in, nobody really cares who the kid is.  And no one has a right to privacy when they’re out in public, and if you’re photographed while you’re out in public, that’s not a violation of your privacy, no matter how old the subject may be.  Additionally, since it’s not my content, I tend to tread lightly when it comes to making edits, and respect the editorial decisions made by the person who published it, i.e. they did what they did when processing a photo for a reason.

So I responded to Aslin:

For those not familiar, the Streisand effect is, according to Wikipedia, “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information.”  It is named for celebrity Barbra Steisand after she made a stink about her house’s appearing in a photo illustrating coastal erosion.  If Streisand had kept her trap shut, no one would have known or cared about it, and it would have remained hidden in plain sight.  In other words, yeah, it’s there, but we don’t know who it belongs to, and so it doesn’t matter.  But because she made a fuss out of it and made a point to let everyone know that it’s her house in that photo, now we all know whose house it is, and look at it because of the fuss surrounding it.  Thus with redacting a photo.  The first thing that I notice in a redacted photo is the big smear of digital color where it should not be, specifically because it is prominent and doesn’t belong there.  If a photo remains unredacted, then no one will notice them, and zero right in on the intended subject.

Let me illustrate what I mean with a couple of photos that I’ve taken of Elyse.  Here are the original photos:

These photos are not new by any means, and were published several years ago.  The first one shows Elyse photographing a fire alarm in Greencastle, Pennsylvania and was taken in 2017, while the second one shows Elyse photographing a helicopter in Wayne County, North Carolina and was taken in 2021.  But in both instances, the photos show Elyse photographing a subject.  In the first one, Elyse’s arms and upward look kind of function like a pointer to direct the eye up to the fire alarm device on the wall.  In the second one, Elyse is on the ground getting a low shot of a helicopter, and while I probably could have done better with the composition, the two are both in there, but I like to think that the helicopter stands out more prominently, since it’s facing the camera, unlike Elyse.

Now imagine some rando found these photos completely out of context.  They wanted to share the photos, but for some ungodly reason, wanted to “protect the privacy” of the person in the shots.  The end result might have looked like this, with scribbles:

Or like this, using emojis:

In either case, a foreign object has been added to each photo, and it stands out very prominently.  In both shots, my eye is immediately drawn to the aftermarket addition to the photo, i.e. the exact thing that we ostensibly want to make go away.  It is the Streisand effect at work, drawing attention to the thing that we would rather not have people see rather than letting it hide in plain sight, plus it breaks the flow of the photos in both cases.

See, if you want to remove someone from a photo, do it right, and go all the way:

My first thought upon seeing this was, “Elyse who?”  Now, mind you, without Elyse’s presence, the photos look weird because the shots’ compositions don’t make sense anymore with a large element of the original image’s being completely removed.  But all the same, no more Elyse, as all traces of her presence have been removed.  But nobody ever does that.  They just do the obnoxious thing and highlight that which they are removing.

Then there’s the subject of bystanders in photos.  These are the perfect instances of people who should be left to hide in plain sight.  They’re not the subject of the photo, and just happened to be in a shot when the photo was taken.  Are we really going to redact all of the bystanders in a photo?  Some people do.  Here’s another example, showing a photo that I took at the Apple Store in Montgomery Mall in 2019 using one of the demo phones:

The photo shows a somewhat busy store, with people going about doing their thing.  Not bad.  Do we know who any of these people are?  No.  Do we care who they are?  Not really.  Are they integral to the shot?  Yes.  After all, the people’s presence indicates that this is a working store that is busy.  An Apple Store with no people in it tells an entirely different story, such as this photo of an Apple Store frozen in time during the pandemic.

All that said, now let’s ruin it with some aftermarket alterations:

Once again, I don’t know about you, but the first thing that I notice now, rather than the general scene of a working Apple Store, is all of the aftermarket alterations.  In the one where the people’s faces are scribbled out, the alteration is the brightest color in the entire image.  On the one that uses emojis, I can’t help but think that it’s almost confrontational, with all of those emojis, particularly that angry one, staring at me (my choice of emojis was admittedly some mild form of social commentary).  In any case, the photo no longer shows what it needs to show because it’s been altered considerably, and to no benefit.  After all, these people are out in plain view in a public location, i.e. a retail store.  They are surrounded by devices with cameras, where customers are encouraged to try out all of their features, and the camera is part of that.  And the potential of being photographed without your knowledge or consent is one of those things that comes with being out in public.  Therefore, it is no one’s duty or responsibility to protect the identity or ensure the anonymity of random people while out in public.  If you want to make yourself anonymous in public, go find one of those COVID masks and put it on.  The same thing goes for license plates.  The thing sits in plain view on your car all day every day, and yet people think that it needs to be redacted in photos online.  Don’t waste your time.

And then there are some really stupid instances of this, where you really question why they bothered posting it at all.  A former colleague of mine posted a photo of them, their husband, and their new baby, with the context being “we now have a newborn!”  They posted a board that showed the kid’s name on it, clear as day, but then they redacted the kid itself from all of the photos.  My thought was, why did you even bother to make the post if you’re going to redact the subject of the post?  Don’t share photos of your kid at all if you’re not going to actually show the kid.  People really don’t think before they post sometimes.

I usually like to use the news media as a standard here.  If a news publication would not do it, then it’s probably not necessary for anyone else to do it.  I say news specifically, because their content is considered editorial in nature, and thus is held to a lower standard than commercial use.  And I would argue that most people’s posts are editorial in nature rather than commercial.  Commercial usage requires releases and such, and that’s why you see redactions on non-news TV shows, because those people presumably didn’t sign releases in order to appear.

Then there’s the special case of local news site The MoCo Show, in that “I can’t believe that they actually ran a photo like this,” kind of way.  Here is the photo:

The article was about how the Montgomery County Police honored Mary Trammell, the longtime owner of the 7-Eleven in the Four Corners area of Silver Spring, on the occasion of her retirement.  So far, so good.  But if you look closely at the photo, submitted to the publication by Officer Rosa Luyo, you will see that three of the officers’ faces are redacted with emojis.  I considered it to be highly unprofessional for a news organization to run that, in that “don’t do that if you still expect us to take you seriously” kind of way, and said as much on the post:

I loved it that once I said something about it, other people chimed in.  And commenter Jude Albert is right: why get in the picture at all if you feel the need to have an emoji over your face?  This is “duh” territory here.  If you don’t want your likeness to be run in a photo about a notable occasion, then don’t get in the photo in the first place – simple as that.  And shame on The MoCo Show for running it that way and not getting a more professional-looking photo, either of the woman without the officers, or of the building without anyone in front of it.  It’s not like someone was holding a gun to anyone’s head at The MoCo Show and telling them to run a photo like that as-is.  They had discretion on what to run, and they chose to run that mess.  Talk about lazy journalism.

Now all of this is not to say that there isn’t a time when it’s proper to redact something out of an image.  Addresses, social security numbers, and things like that, sure.  We don’t want identity theft, and we don’t necessarily want randos showing up at the door.  And it can be done tastefully.  Remember that threatening letter that I got from Scientology’s attorneys back in 2008?  The version that I published on here back then has my address redacted.  But it’s done in a low key way so as to not detract from everything else.  Alternately, rather than blurring it as I did there, I could have simply removed it completely.  So don’t get me wrong – there are times when it is necessary and proper, but those times are not as common as the Internet at large thinks that they are.

And lastly, it is in quite poor taste to suggest that someone redact things in content that they have published.  I remember when I published a photo of myself holding up an item in front of my then-new house, indicating that we live there now.  My address numbers were visible in the background.  Someone told me that I should redact that.  I flatly told them no, and considered the suggestion to be poor form.  After all, it’s my house, and who are you to tell me what I should and should not show of my own house?  Plus, it’s not that hard to find out where I live, so if you’re that interested, go for it, and make sure to bring some Beaver Nuggets for Elyse and me if you decide to visit.

So all in all, let’s let this ridiculous redaction culture that I’ve seen online lately die.  It’s annoying, and it serves no real purpose.

Categories: DC area local news, Elementary school, Fire alarms, Netculture