Is Google's face blurring enough for Street View?

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 May 2008 07:11

Business IT - Networking

Google is testing technology to blur faces seen in Steet View images, but is that enough to satisfy people's privacy concerns?

The company has been working on automatic face blurring for a year, and this week began a public test involving views of Manhattan.

"Working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection," said software engineer Andrea Frome.

The sample images provided by Google suggest the engineers have done a good job of avoiding loss of detail in the non-face parts of the pictures.

The problem is that the blurring is quite soft and while it would be surprising if another automated system could match an obscured face with someone in its database, a human could probably recognise someone they knew.

Anyone caught in an embarrassing situation - sunbathing, nose picking or outside a questionable establishment, for instance - may feel face blurring doesn't go far enough, so they'll have to continue to rely on Google's image removal tools.

Product manager Andrew Foster said "we will continue to work hard to improve it [face blurring] as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery."

But that does not address all privacy concerns.

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