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Google's Satellites Could Soon See Your Face From Space
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes Two months ago, after much lobbying by the biggest satellite company in North America, DigitalGlobe, the US government relaxed restrictions to allow for commercially available satellite imagery up to 25 cm resolution—twice as detailed as the previous limit of 50 cm.
The DigitalGlobe's Worldview-3, the first commercial satellite set to capture these high-res images is set to launch this Wednesday. Six months after that, private businesses, including its regular client Google, will be able to get their hands on hyper-detailed photos and videos of the globe.
The DigitalGlobe's Worldview-3, the first commercial satellite set to capture these high-res images is set to launch this Wednesday. Six months after that, private businesses, including its regular client Google, will be able to get their hands on hyper-detailed photos and videos of the globe.
doesn't that mean my entire face would be 1 pixel large?
...If you are fat.
Your face will occupy all of one quarter of a pixel 25cm x 25cm. Good luck seeing your face from satellite. It is high res. But not so high as to see a face.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Using the Street View face-recognition technology, they can blur the face of anybody looking up at the time of capture, for privacy reasons. Hooray!
...well, they can already see your Blurred face (or dog, incredibly enough) from any street anywhere. But from outer space, at least I'd have several layers of atmosphere, clouds and whatnot to protect my pretty limbs from prying eyes in the sky.
Have you seen the weather data you can download freely? It's available from a satellite near you (or an internet site, if you don't have a clue like most people...yes they don't have a clue). The resolution, (high res MAP) is terrible. Why? Ever heard of atmosphere? It's so thick you won't be able to make out anything in detail, what you see at google Maps...is in fact as good as it gets, not kidding!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
They could get better and better satellites with higher resolutions, and continuously lobby the US government to allow higher resolutions to be released.
Or they could use planes, and StreetView cars... Like they currently do.
i saw what you did here. starting a haiku?
Or 4x the resolution (a 50cm square being 4x as large as a 25cm square)?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
25cm is obviously 4 times the detail of 50cm resolution, not twice.
Privacy will be a thing of the past in no time. The only matter is when do we reach the point of no return.
...and for those of you not up on your 70's TV shows, Robin Williams committed suicide.
So, can we get the "evidence" now?
This sort of nonsense sensationalist reporting belongs on CNN not slashdot - you will not be able to make out any feature's of a persons face on any of the imagery, as the deatil level will be 1 pixel per face.
...is shot from space?!!
Isn't it 4 times as detailed?
...you obviously haven't been hanging around here for long.
I have complete confidence that companies will follow all laws even for things that are to be placed forever out of the reach of inspectors. Even if they could, they would never just put an artificial restriction on the equipment for when some clueless government inspector wants to do the pre-launch check.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Google and other online map-providing companies supplement satellite imagery with aerial photography, and as far as I know, there are no limits on that sort of thing.
Twice as detailed, or 4 times as detailed?
can see my face from inside my house.
And we're done.
The company whose boss said I should not expect privacy on Internet will soon have satellites. What could go wrong?
Indeed with 25cm resolution they cannot recognize people, but they can still track their movements. And combined with data from smartphones, identifying someone gets easier.
is much bigger than 25 cm. I am very happy that they will be able to see it clearly.
I always walk around outside looking at the ground (don't like the sight of moving people).
Google isn't going to film my face from space - at least, not until they cover the ground with mirrors.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Pay no attention to the Google street view vehicle that captured your dong. Or at least, some dong. To be fair though, there are probably a lot of dongs on that street.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If your face is a single color rectangle (one pixel at 25 cm resolution) than, sure the satellite can see your "face".
Google Street View cars are doing a great job so far:
http://mashable.com/2013/06/10...
Just wondering. If the resolution limit is imposed by a restriction, then what would a satellite be able to do if the only limitation was technological?
I remember seeing a documentary about leaked details of satellites that could read the headlines off a newspaper in the early 1970s, but they would have had very low orbits and didn't stay up long, mainly because they would run out of film.
From low orbit, about 25cm is reported for military satellites. Maybe a little better. DigitalGlobe is now at 41cm. Reading newspaper headlines from orbit is unlikely. If the military satellites were doing that well, there would be little reason to fly recon drones or aircraft.
Once you can recognize vehicles, weapons, and troops from orbit, more resolution doesn't help much militarily. The next step, which is where DigitalGlobe is going, is more frequent imagery, and wider fields of view and more downlink bandwidth without giving up resolution. Digital Globe says they collect 3 million km^2 of imagery per day. That's only 0.6% of the earth's surface.
Hmm i wonder if they could use multiple autonomous solar powerred drones to give much finer details.
aerial imagery will never be a problem as these are static snapshots. They don't show anything private and the current rate of 1fpa (frames per annum) depending on region they don't yield enough data for anything unless you have really bad luck doing something really dumb and one datapoint is enough.
The resolution in time is so much worse than everything else that is collected about you that people who want to invade your privacy use other sources and then point a satellite to the location they want to watch. You are tracked by mobile, financial transactions, traffic cameras and everything is reported in real time and apparently "nobody" cares.
Some sort of hat is probably in order.
commercially available satellite imagery up to 25 cm resolution
If you have a huge face, at least.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
AFAIK this limit was for _selling_ photos commercially, not for taking them. Those satellites could already take photos at higher resolution (25cm or better), they just had to be provided to USA government and noone else.
50cm images sold commercially were probably upsampled from 25cm photos anyway.
Limit was also only applicable in USA (obviously), and was changed to allow USA companies to compete with rest of the world as technologies advance.
If the US government disallows commercial satellite images to have a resolution finer than 25cm Google could have contracted with satellite companies from Europe or India or Japan or Russia or China - they do not have that kind of artificial restriction
If I were Google, I would set up a foreign subsidiary and sent up a satellite that can have far sharper image than whatever the US government imposes and then use those images in the Google Map / Google Earth
Oh no! That pixel representing the 25x25 area of my face will violate my privacy so badly if I happen to look up at the wrong moment!
By taking a lot of images of the same spot with small time/angle deltas and at different wavelengths, you can push the limits on resolution. It can also help to filter out atmospheric blurring.
So, we'll now be able to see their ugly, tall beards from space.
I seriously do not understand what they mean by 50cm (or 25cm) resolution. On the current Google Maps picture of our house, you can clearly see the yellow garden hose snaking across the lawn. The garden hose is maybe 3cm thick. We have stepping stones in the lawn, averaging maybe 40cm by 60cm; each stone clearly occupies multiple pixels. I would guess that a single pixel represents about 10cm.
This is in Switzerland. Are photos in the USA fuzzier? I just zoomed in on a military base, and I can clearly see the lines painted between parking spaces. Those are, what, maybe 10cm? Each line occupies about 2 pixels on my screen.
So, serious question, what is meant by a 50cm satellite resolution?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I would place a bet that perhaps thee will be a launch failure if it does not serve the interests of some unnamed national security interest organization.
So you're telling me that if I want to protect my privacy now, I either have to stop looking straight up while I'm walking around? How the hell am I supposed to see where I'm not going?!? And what am I supposed to do if I accidentally make eye contact with someone???
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Actually, if the former limit was 50cm and the new one is 25cm, the resulting images will be four times as detailed, not two.
The airy disk is no longer the only limiting factor in optics. Bright objects especially (like, say, the earth) can be imaged well beyond with diffraction correction, fast image recombination/stacking, Pixon method etc. Milli-arcseconds are common even in longer exposures, which corresponds to ~1mm at 240 kilometers.
As someone pointed out, 25cm is the limit for public sale.
The KH series birds are all Hubble-class, pointing down at us, so smile.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yaBtMQxtC98J:https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/view-keyhole-satellite/+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
I am looking forward to my portrait in a glorious two pixel resolution.
Dennis Onstenk
Wouldn't you have to be looking straight up for a satellite to see your face? I don't know about you, but I hardly ever look straight up into space except at night to look at the stars, and at night I think it would be hard for a satellite to see me.
This is four times the resolution, two times in each direction.
What resolution do we think that government satellites can do?
http://gobbledygeekbtr.files.w...
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Ok, nitpicking here, but whatever. If you go from 50 cm to 25 cm resolution, yes, that's double the resolution. But an image exists 2 dimensions, so it's double in the x direction and double in the y direction for a total improvement of 4 times. What used to be one pixel is now four.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
That's no face station, that's a moon ...
So some telescopes can see 1000's out light years away and capture even the smallest amount of light..... Now imagine just tuning it around and looking at Earth!
I would rather that google had a legitimate *real time* display on it's google earth so that I'm not looking at some piece of land that was photographed in 2009.. THe resolution on Google Earth is appaling, and streets is better, but beinmg six years out of date makes it useless fior my needs. I once was trying to send someone a screenshot of my address to help them find it.. being in the country it can be difficult.. but I'd onl;y been living there 5 years and still that was too recvent, as all google streets showed where I lived was shrubbery. where I am currently is at least 3 years out of date, and the best resolution I can get shows my entire property as a big blurry white blob. I think they've got a little bit more work to do than they're letting on
Title says nothing about being able to distinguish things like ears, nose, eyes, hair, etc... We will be able to see your face as exactly a pixel.
Considering how satellites transverse the Earth, we may even be able to once every couple of years! :)
That said, might be able to do analysis on face complexion if nothing else...
ENHANCE!