Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is the nice thing about living in a town no one cares about/knows about.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
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?
steampunk web design
Print a giant face over your storefront/building just to see what happens.
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...
I don't read replies by ACs.
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
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
:) 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.
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
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.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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.