Signal comes with a decent set of in-built privacy features, one of which allows you to blur faces in your profile picture. This allows you to keep a personalized picture while ensuring that the identity of everyone involved stays hidden. Let’s take a look at how you can blur your profile picture in Signal. 

Note: Currently, the ability to blur profile pictures is only available to Android users. 

Required

  • An Android device
  • Signal set up and logged in on your device
  • The profile picture you wish to blur on your local storage

Guide

Open Signal on your device and tap on your profile picture in the top left corner. 

Now tap on your name at the top. 

Tap on your profile picture. 

Tap on ‘Choose from gallery’. 

Now tap and choose your profile picture. Proceed to resize the profile picture using the pinch gesture to get the perfect fit. 

Tap on the checkmark in the top right corner to save your changes. 

Now tap the blur icon in the top right corner of your screen. 

Turn on the toggle for ‘Blur faces’ at the bottom of your screen. 

Blur should now be automatically applied to all the faces in your profile picture. Tap on the checkmark in the top right corner of your screen to save your changes. 

Note: If Signal fails to detect a face in your photo, you can simply tap and draw on the image to apply blur manually. 

Tap on the checkmark again to finalize your profile picture. 

Finally, tap on ‘Save’ at the bottom of your screen. 

And that’s it! Faces should now be blurred in your profile picture.

When will blur faces be available for iOS?

There is no word on the availability of this feature for iPhones for now. Considering that Signal likes to keep both the apps consistent with each other, we can expect to see this feature in future updates. But considering the more important scaling of servers currently at hand, you shouldn’t expect this feature anytime soon. 

I hope you were able to easily blur faces in your profile picture on Signal using this guide. If you have any questions or face any issues, feel free to reach out using the comments section below.