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Google Begins Blurring Faces In Street View

Posted by kdawson on from the middle-ground-in-range-of-both-sides'-fire dept.

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."

6 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Anonymity by Descalzo · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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    I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
  2. Other uses for this technology by muellerr1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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    steampunk web design
  3. Print a giant face over your storefront by SkyMunky · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Print a giant face over your storefront by ReverendLoki · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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?

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  4. Re:Kudos to Google! by nbert · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

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    I don't read replies by ACs.
  5. Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures by pavon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.