Thread by @amateuradam

A quick thread on in the importance of being careful what data you share - even if you're the Queen. Today, Her Maj tweeted this lovely picture, gor bless er, etc. You might think that the contents of the red box would be official business. And you'd be right. 1/6

Now, bearing in mind this is just what I can achieve as an amateur Adam with a laptop, it makes you wonder what other matters of state might have been shared over the years. Let's spin this round a bit and have a quick look at the top document. 2/6

A quick click of the Perspective Warp function on Photoshop gets it looking a little bit squarer. 3/6

We can probably lose the colour at this point as we're just looking at text. And given we've lost the bit under the red box in any case, I'm just going to concentrate on the words down the left hand side. Here. 4/6

Not looking great, I'd agree. And we're not in 24 where you can magically sharpen a CCTV image. BUT. When it's text you're looking at, computers do have a major card up their sleeves. Words are simply patterns of pixels, and having looked at multi-zillions of them, they're... 5/6

...remarkably good at guessing what a word might be, even if the words are fuzzy round the edges. Optical character recognition, it's called. So - without further ado - I've overlaid the best guess (99.3% accuracy per character) for the document in question. 6/6