Google blurs faces of those caught on Street View

by Carrie-Ann Skinner

May 14, 2008 —

In an attempt to quash privacy fears, Google has started blurring the faces
of people displayed on its controversial Street
View software.

Street View, which was launched last year, is an add-on to Google
Maps and Google Earth
that offers photographs of streets and cities in the US.

However, the software raised a number of privacy
concerns regarding how identifiable people and houses were in the images.
Among the complaints Google received were those regarding a man pictured exiting
a San Francisco strip club and a woman sunbathing.

The search-engine is trialing face-detection technology, which will blur the
faces of those caught on camera in Manhattan. If the technique proves successful,
it will be rolled out to other areas.

Google software engineer, Andrea Frome said in a blog: "This effort has
been a year in the making."

"Working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to
advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard
to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery."

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