8. January 2026
In 2026, we are living in a visual world. Cameras are embedded everywhere in modern infrastructure, capturing sensitive personal data from smart cities, vehicle dashcams, to market research, and even for AI training, organizations are capturing more and more video and image data than ever before. This makes visual data sensitive and difficult to manage under modern privacy regulations. This growth in visual data creates ample opportunities for innovation, analytics and service improvements. At the same time, it also creates and introduces us to significant privacy, security, and compliance concerns. Unlike the normal data sets, visual datasets often capture multiple identifiers at once, sometimes also at scale. Every frame of a video can contain personal data like faces and license plates, which contains dozens of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), creating a privacy and security liability and a very complex compliance challenge.
What Visual PII Should I Be Protecting?
Cybersecurity is no longer limited to cybercrimes like hacked databases or phishing emails, but also unprotected image and video data is also a major vulnerability.
Nowadays, image and video data can easily be scraped, leaked, or misused. Whenever visual data is compromised, there can be a severe impact of privacy violations, identity theft, severe regulatory fines and reputational damages, which can also result in monetary setbacks. Under global privacy laws ,depending on the region, mishandling personal data can also result in the following:
- European Union: Fines up to 20 Million EUR or 4% of annual global revenue, whichever is higher
- In USA, under California‘s CCPA/CPRA, Penalties are up to $7,500 per intentional violation
- Under Japan’s APPI: Up to JPY 100 million for corporationals depending on the case
Beyond fines, businesses/organisations face growing concerns resulting in scrutiny from regulators, customers, partners, and other stakeholders.
Visual personal data extends far beyond the obvious, and some of the common categories are:
- Biometric Data: Faces are considered “special category data” under GDPR, requiring the highest level of protection.
- License Plates: These are directly linkable to individuals and their home addresses.
- Contextual Identifiers:
These include:
- People in the background
- House numbers
- Street signs
- Unique tattoos
- Text on a screen or paper
The “Re-identification” Risk: Traditional de-identification techniques like pixelation and adding black boxes on image & video data are often not sufficient, as they can be reversed easily, and even when they are not, “blurred” data still has the sensitive information that exists with privacy risk.
How Can I Protect Visual PII with AI?
Protecting visual data at scale is impossible if done manually. The only effective solution is to embed privacy directly into your workflow using AI, and that is what we do for our clients.
Here’s how to secure your visual data:
- Automated Detection:
You need an AI model that can automatically detect all identifiers and PII in any conditions. brighter AI’s technology is trained to identify faces, license plates, and even full bodies with industry-leading accuracy, even in low light, at difficult angles, or in crowded scenes.
Trusted by leading brands, this is also a testimony to our precise detection technology.
- Go Beyond Blurring with Anonymization:
Basic de-identification tools are using outdated technology. They often destroy the value of your data and often leave a re-identification risk. With brighter AI’s anonymization technology, which precisely removes PIIs with synthetic overlays. A real face is replaced with an artificial, unique synthetic layer, preserving attributes like “looking left” or “wearing a hat” without exposing the real person.
- Maintain Data Utility for Analytics:
By replacing PII instead of just hiding it, your data remains 100% anonymous but 100% useful. You can still train your AI models, run traffic flow analysis, or gather customer insights. While being fully compliant with any privacy regulations in the world.
- Ensure Comprehensive Protection:
Visual privacy protection must be extended beyond faces alone. An efficient solution should support anonymisation of faces, full bodies, license plates across regions and use-cases covering all personally identifiable information.
With brighter AI’s redaction solutions are comprehensive, allowing you to anonymize faces, full bodies, and all license plate formats (including custom and international plates).
- Process Data Securely (On-Premise or Private Cloud):
Sending highly sensitive video footage to a third-party processor is a major security risk. One should pick a solution that can be used easily in your secure environment, whether on-site or in your private cloud. This ensures your original, sensitive data never leaves your control.
- Selective Redaction Based on Need:
Not all use cases need the same level of redaction. brighter AI, gives you an option for Selective Redaction. You can manually remove false negatives with our solutions, like Full Body Blur and Precision Blur.
With Selective Redaction, you can adjust your custom selection to stay un-redacted if needed.
- Guarantee Compliance with “Privacy by Design.”
By embedding our solution into your pipeline, which is built for “Privacy by Design,” you can showcase the ‘Privacy By Default’ to the regulators, by using our anonymization solution to address regulators.
This solution is certified and effective and used by industry leaders across sectors. This state-of-the-art measure protects personal data and future-proofs your business against evolving laws.
What are the EU Rules for Visual Data?
European digital rules are zeroing in on protecting and safeguarding biometric and visual data. Proactive protection is no longer optional; it is a business and strategic need. Among the many pieces of legislation dealing with biometric and visual data, three in particular stand out:
- The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): classifying “biometric data for uniquely identifying a natural person” (like a face) as sensitive data. Collecting or processing this data without explicit consent or a rock-solid legal basis is illegal. Anonymization is the gold standard for removing data from the scope of GDPR.
- The AI Act: This landmark regulation classifies many AI systems that use visual data (like remote biometric identification in public spaces) as “high-risk.” These systems face strict requirements for data governance, security, and transparency, which, if not met, can cause serious financial harm to affected companies. Using properly anonymized data is a key strategy for compliance.
- The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): This act mandates that “products with digital features” (like smart cameras or in-car systems) are to be secure by design. This includes securing the data they collect. brighter AI helps manufacturers meet this requirement by building privacy protection directly into the product.
brighter AI’s DNAT anonymization solution is the world’s most advanced automatic redaction software for images and videos. Our technology is key to not only complying with key regulations, but to be ahead of the curve. By anonymizing data, we empower your business to thrive while leaving the burden of compliance on us.
Our mission is to protect every identity in public, including PIIs. We help organizations become compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR, PIPA, CCPA and other privacy regulations around the world. We anonymize image and video data. This prevents people from being recognized. It also ensures that no personal information can be linked back to an individual.
If you would like to learn more about our anonymization solution, check out the case studies below, or contact us at https://brighter.ai/contact.
