Blurred Vision

Posted on May 16, 2008

After complaints of privacy invasion started coming in, Google has begun automatically blurring faces of people captured in the street photos taken for Google Maps.

Although Google’s Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, crossing the street, sunbathing — everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for the future.

Some privacy advocates began suggesting that Google find a way to blur the faces of people so they could not be identified. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View’s goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

So Google revealed this week that it has taken the algorithm and run with it, announcing it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition formula that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View.

A Google spokesman said the company is still working on fine-tuning the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things — things incorrectly interpreted as faces — but for now, that seems a better approach than leaving too many faces un-blurred.

I hope they don’t blur me. I would like to have my 15 minutes of fame. But, not to fear….they won’t be doing my Street View until 2038, by which time I shall have moved on.