That’s a fair point. I have never seen it done from a video before specifically, but I am positive that it is a technique which is theoretically possible given that there is enough data in the image. Obviously if the image was grainy to begin with then it doesn’t matter what you do to it, you won’t get anything better than the original. And regardless of how the file is exported, as long as you can take a screenshot of the video afterwards and there is enough definition in the image I don’t see how this technique couldn’t be applied.

Edit: and to be clear, I don’t know what specific transformation(s) are traditionally used in video editing. For all I know it could be a long list of transformations that are all coded to happen with the click of a button to make it more difficult to unblur. But even that isn’t entirely safe. There is just literally no reason to not use a black box/elipse or whatever in cases where the data is actually sensitive.

Makes sense. What a ridiculous statement to have made to begin with though.

It’s interesting that they would choose to blur them if it’s that sensitive considering blurring things isn’t actually destructive and if you were to figure out the settings they used to blur then you can easily apply the opposite effect to unblur the image. To be truly destructive they should use black boxes over faces.

And regardless of the method they use it really shouldn’t take long to do either.