Google Street View has long been picked on for invading people's privacy. Though the case law on the matter clearly establishes that walking down the street and the exterior of your house visible from the street aren't 'private,' most people are still leery of having their pictures posted on Google Maps as they walked down the road.
But good news for future photographic subjects: Google has begun implementing face-blurring technology in their Street View maps. Case #1: Manhattan.
Google's photocars revisited Manhattan (yep, just Manhattan. Apparently, it still sucks to be you, lesser boroughs. Especially you, Staten Island.), one of the first places that they'd scanned. I don't know about you, but I've been pretty disappointed recently, going from looking at my house in decent resolution and good street-level coverage (not to mention being able to pan up) to taking vicarious vacations to New York. (Unless the city really was that blurry until recently. Was it? And all the buildings stopped around the third story.)
The now hi-res (and I can tell you, they added a bunch more streets), pan-up-able shots of the borough also feature the "face-blurring technology," which Google says:
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.
Will this reduce the resistance from privacy advocates? Probably not. But it might give the rest of us a little more peace of mind.
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