Focusing on the specifics of image deobfuscation is missing a vastly larger point.

A large part of the implications of this research are about the amount of information needed to reliably identify a given human being. About 33 bits of nonredundant data -- enough that an image with 64 bits of extractable data might serve to identify any person with considerable redundancy.

And where that might be obtained from, how computers rather than humans could suss out identifying information, often where humans cannot, and finally, the questions of who might be motivated to use such information, on whom, and to what ends, which gets to the rather deeper question of the morality of technology, and how to address issues in which technology is in all likelihood inevitable, if not particularly desirable.

There's a good discussion of many of these points in a post by Yonatan Zunger at G+, which I recommend: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/HxrBbAskg19

Yonatan and others raise a number of points.

Humans are very good at recognising faces, particularly intact ones. But computers can key off of other factors. Blurring out faces leaves other identifiable elements, including body morphology, clothing, skin or hair patterns, gait, vocal tones, writing patterns (even after multiple passes through Google Translate), and more.

Reconstructing blurred or pixelated faces is the least of our problems.

In the question of who benefits -- qui bono* -- I find it useful to consider that Francis Bacon's dictum is false.* Knowledge isn't power. But knowledge is a power multiplier. The party with intrinsically greater power, and information resources, and access (overtly or covertly) to corpora of identifying data and observations to be matched, has the distinct advantage. The more so if it can both acquire data and act with impunity.

This is amplified for any party which can either acquire data, or act, with impunity. National security organisations, international criminal syndicates, entities such as Anonymous, and non-state terrorist organisations all fall into this general category, though with differing resource and vulnerability profiles themselves.

This is balanced, somewhat, against the size of the surveilled population. Mass efforts, such as Edward Snowden revealed the NSA to be engaged in, are sweeping through tens of millions to billions of targets. A group targeting an oligarchical power structure has a much smaller and more tractable problem -- the six members, say, of a Communist Party Standing Committee, a few hundred national legislators, or the tens of thousands of members of the 0.01% elite of the US or Europe, say.

The nobility has the advantage of resources and power. The mobility, as Neal Stephenson termed the Mob, has the advantage of loose structures and high resilience, though it can also be difficult to organise effectively.

A particularly explosive situation emerges where a faction of the nobility discover a means to energise the mobility to their ends: demagoguery.

The technologies being demonstrated are only going to become more effective. So long as there's a technological civilisation, these capabilities will increase. Rebottling the genie is almost certainly impossible.

I'm left wondering both how this might be mitigated (if at all). Or, perhaps more possibly, how it will change dynamics of surveillance, sousveillance, mass protest, international espionage and crime, and more.

Another thought occurs: reverse-engineering algorithms might make it possible to construct obfuscated images which a machine reads as identifying some specific individual, but which no human would be able to either identify or challenge. Raising new concerns over fabricated evidence or narratives, whether as a framing mechanism against an enemy, or as part of a self-promotion campaign ("I was at Our Group's Great Defining Event and This Machine-Identifiable Image is Proof").

Interesting times / so it goes.