p2pnet - rss feed: Google gets fuzzy over privacy
p2pnet news | Products:- If you’re a Google Street View user and people’s faces seem kind of, well, hazy, no worries.
That’s because they may kind of, well, hazy.
Do No Evil has started testing what the CNET News describes as “face-blurring” in response to “privacy concerns” from its “all-seeing digital camera eye”.
“The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google’s image database for faces, then blurs them,” the story has said John Hanke (right), director of Google Earth and Google Maps, saying Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog.
Dealing with privacy, both legal requirements and social norms, is hard but necessary, Hanke says in the story. “It’s a legitimate issue,” he said, likening the issues, “some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps.”
It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to, “get comfortable with the feature,” but, “It needs that debate,” CNET has hin stating, going on, “We see that and try to let it play out.”
Good.
Maybe Google will soon also do something about other blurry privacy concerns, but from the reverse point of view, clarifying exactly what it does and doesn’t do with user data, how it’s managed, and who it’s shared with.
.
.Stumble It!
CNET News - Google begins blurring faces in Street View, May 13, 2008
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May 14th, 2008 at 11:08 am
You know…I found my old house on google street view, in fact several of my room-mate’s cars are parked outside, but I think I was at work. Seeing one of them (or myself) standing on the front porch would have been frigging sweet in my opinion! If I wanted to hide I’d go live in a cave….Google street view isn’t what worries me, it’s that damn ghetto bird with the IR cameras that can see right through your roof that pisses me off…
May 14th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
I wonder if the algorithm takes fuglyness into account. We’re going to be looking at a street with everyones face obscured except some freak of nature.