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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."

12 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Kudos to Google! by Colonel+Korn · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's been awhile since a Google post on Slashdot has focused on the company improving our privacy. Good work!

    --
    "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
    1. Re:Kudos to Google! by njcoder · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, most people could probably care less about faces. As long as stuff like this shows up from time to time.

      --
      Open Source Java DAO Generator
    2. Re:Kudos to Google! by DreamingReal · · Score: 5, Funny

      I agree completely. That was taken across the street from my Dad's house. I think I really need to visit my old man more often.

      --
      We want some answers and all that we get
      Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
      - Ministry
    3. Re:Kudos to Google! by njcoder · · Score: 5, Funny

      They may have to develop a new recognition tool Yes!

      to blur things like that. No!
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      Open Source Java DAO Generator
  2. What privacy concerns? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Google has begun blurring faces in its Street View service, which has spawned privacy concerns since its introduction last year.

    My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy. Or is that just a U.S. thing? Furthermore, as their algorithms get better, will Google skip blurring the faces of famous people? They certainly have no expectations of privacy in public.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:What privacy concerns? by Moridineas · · Score: 5, Funny

      My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy. Or is that just a U.S. thing? Actually, in the rest of the more civilized world, you're not allowed to look at people without their permission. Just one more way in which the US is lagging behind!
    2. Re:What privacy concerns? by thomasdz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My understanding is that people in public should have no expectations of privacy.


      That's an overly simplified view. Are you saying that in public it should be legal to be able to take pictures of anybody from any angle/viewpoint? (eg: upskirt)
      Can I take my parabolic microphone and start recording people's conversations 100 meters away and then post the conversations on the Internet?
      Why can't people walk around with no clothes on in public if they aren't doing anything weird or being "sexual" (whatever that means)?
      If there are no expectations of privacy, then what's the problem? (sarcasm)

      I would modify your "no expectations of privacy in public" to "reduced expectations of privacy in public"

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      Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
  3. Awwww by DeadPanDan · · Score: 5, Funny

    They should have used Laughing Man logos. You blew it Google.

  4. Re:Anonymity by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yah, I too live in a small town that Google Street View will never get to. But what I really like about our little town is how much personality it has! I mean, just the other day I saw a couple of college kids driving around down in a little car with this big metal pole with a weird round black thing on top of it sticking out the middle of the roof . Those crazy kids! Must've been some weird fraternity prank or something.

  5. Invisible watchers... by argent · · Score: 5, Funny

    Because, you know, the LAST thing I want to happen when I'm out on a public street is to be seen by millions of invisible people hiding in the Google van.

    O HI, I FIXED UR POST, KTHX.

  6. I'm so relieved! by dsouza42 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Looks like Google also cares a about horse privacy. That's really great! I woudn't want anyone recognizing my horse if he's caught doing something embarassing out in the street.

  7. Re:Can you focus out-of-focus pictures by pavon · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can't add pixels that aren't there, and an out of focus picture is effectively a lower resolution. No, it isn't. Think about an unfocused camera - all the light is still hitting film/CCD, it is just spread out. So from an information theory point of view you haven't lost any data, you just put it into another form. If you consider what would be a single point of light, the energy in that point is spread out in a normal distribution (aka bell curve, aka gaussian). So the blurred image is just all these Gaussians functions overlayed on top of each other. Computer blurring algorithms do pretty much the same thing.

    From a signal processing perspective, this is the same as convolving with a Gaussian. And if you take the Fourier transform of that blurred image, you get the transform of the image multiplied by the transform of the Gaussian (which is just another Gaussian). From there all you have to do is divide by this Gaussian, take the inverse transform, and walla, you have the desired non-blurred image. This is called a deconvolution, and I've written code to do this for an image processing class.

    There are some caveats. You have to guess how blurred the image is - what focal length is and what not. Noise and compression can kill you, so you need to filter those out first (or limit your deconvolution filter to low frequency content). In addition at the edges of the image (or edge of the blur boundary) information is genuinely lost as the gaussian falls outside the boundary and is discarded.

    Focus Magic is a commercial package that refocuses blurred images, and they have some interesting sample photos.