Google Begins Blurring Faces In Street View

mytrip notes a News.com article reporting that Google has begun blurring faces in its Street View service, which has spawned privacy concerns since its introduction last year. Google has been working for a couple of years to advance the state of the art of face recognition. Quoting News.com: 'The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference...' Google wrote about the program in their Lat/Long blog."

Anonymity

[Descalzo]

This is the nice thing about living in a town no one cares about/knows about.

Other uses for this technology

[muellerr1]

It would be cool if there were an option on sites like Facebook or Flickr to blur the faces on my photos for anyone but my friends.

With technology like this, I wonder how far away Google Image Search is from being able to search image content?

Print a giant face over your storefront

[SkyMunky]

Print a giant face over your storefront/building just to see what happens.

Re:Print a giant face over your storefront

[ReverendLoki]

I was just thinking how well this would work with reproductions of faces.

The smiling, friendly faces of your local anchorpersons on that billboard for the nightly news? Blurred.

How about that chimp staring out from that zoo as the Google van went past?

And what about the mannequins in the storefront window?

Re:Kudos to Google!

[nbert]

Ignoring the sarcasm: There's a big difference between a country requesting to blur out parts and individuals not wanting to appear in certain areas. It's a good thing that they blur out faces and I was quite surprised that they didn't consider it before Street View launched.

IMO governments have to be as transparent as possible for a good reason. It's a different story if you as a "normal" person walk by a brothel or sit in a park (half-) naked. It all depends on the time the google truck passes and I don't see a reason why we have a right to see these people the moment they were photographed...

You mean like these guys:

[wsanders]

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=smiley+face&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=116.007505,75.410156&ie=UTF8&ll=33.808729,-118.22742&spn=0.002102,0.001151&t=h&z=19 [google.com]

Re:What privacy concerns?

[JanneM]

He's completely on point. The parent poster asked if we should have any expectations of privacy while in public. He shows that yes, we do have some expectations on privacy; the discussion is thus about what those expectations should be. You can't, for instance, take a picture of somebody, then use it for commercial purposes without their explicit permission (look up "release form"), and Google is probably dangerously close to be over that line already.

A newspaper and a television station has very free rein publishing what they want - as long as they can argue it's news. A newspaper can for instance not just take a shot of someone on the street, then use that shot for an advertisement (or sell it to an ad agency) - their relative freedom of using other persons likeness is limited to actual news.

Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures

[pavon]

Oh, one other caveat, is that when you quantize the blurred image (assign each pixels a discrete, say 24-bit, value), you will also loose some information.

Furthermore, I should mention that given the size of peoples faces, and the amount of blur that Google is likely to use, the entire blurred section will be near enough to the edge to loose significant information, so it is unlikely that much recovery will be possible.

So, nothing I said was really applicable to this situation :) I was just surprised myself to learn that a blurred image is not the same as a lower resolution image, and so I thought I'd share.

Privacy exists in private places, not in public

[aristotle-dude]

Why do people expect privacy on a public street? It is called the "public" for a reason. I do not feel that Google should bother censoring anything that occurs in the public eye.

Ever hear of a "Model Release"??

[IvyKing]

The issue is that Google is publishing identifiable pictures of people without having secured a model release from the people in the picture. Really dumb on Google's part - I wouldn't be surprised if they get still hit with a bunch of lawsuits - what they are doing now is to head off having even more lawsuits filed against them.