Send hidden messages in your photos through “Cryptstagram”
posted Friday, October 11, 2013 at 12:14 PM EST
People around the world are concerned with their online privacy, thanks to revelations the NSA is intercepting and reading things we thought were otherwise secret. However, people also like sharing images, especially if overloaded with wacky filters. Now you can combine those pursuits with Cryptstagram, an image sharing service that also serves to encode and send secret messages.
On one level, Cryptstagram is a set of glitch art filters for your photos. You upload your image to the service, and get to throw filters on top with names like "doublespeak", "NSA", and "cryptonym", all of which push the image further into illegibility.
But while you're merrily rendering your image unintelligible, you also have the option to attach a message and password to it. Anyone with the password can decrypt the text, and get the secret message. Unfortunately, the password doesn't revert the photo to its original state, which would be even more neat.
The site comes from the Barbarian Group, who made it as a little side project, but view it as a way to increase the discourse about surveillance and privacy. Talking to Wired, they said:
“We create volumes of data every day just browsing the web, texting friends, moving around with a cell phone. It’s still largely the wild west out there with regard to what companies can do with that data.”
To try it out, we encrypted this image. The password on it is imaging_resource, we're sure you can figure out the rest!