Faces blurred in Google Street View images
From correspondents in San Francisco May 15, 2008 12:50pm
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GOOGLE has started blurring the faces of people in street scenes pictured on its free online mapping service.
The US internet colossus said it was testing the technology in updated Street View pictures woven into its map of Manhattan and, if successful, would put it to work across its mapping website.
While blurring faces may reduce complaints that snapshots of street life posted with Google Maps results could violate people’s privacy, that was not the motivation for applying the technology, Google said.
When Street View launched in the US last year, it quickly attracted controversy after claims several images breached privacy.
Some images identified men outside strip clubs, women sunbaking in parks and even captured a woman’s g-string as she emerged from her car.
Soon after, Google modified several images to remove or mask the identity of individuals.
However a Google spokeswoman said privacy was not the motivation for applying the new face-blurring technology.
“It is something we have been looking into for quite some time,” she said.
“The purpose of Street View isn’t looking at people, it’s looking at buildings and locations. Obviously, we want to take steps in protecting people’s privacy, but from the beginning we’ve been committed to doing this.”
Google has been working for a year on a way to automatically detect and blur faces in pictures, Google software engineer Andrea Frome said in a blog post.
“Working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection,” she said.
“We continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery.”
Ms Frome pointed out that Manhattan street view pictures were also modified to allow people to look up to admire skyscrapers and the cityscape.
Street View is available for several US cities and is scheduled to launch in Australia later this year.
Links
Google Street View New York – http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=n…
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