“Google faces criticism that Street View is an invasion of privacy.”
Burlingame, Calif. — Google Street View has long been picked on for invading people’s privacy that has led the world’s number one search provider to fuzz out the faces of people, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant’s all-seeing digital camera eye, including Google’s Street View product.
“Privacy crusaders have gathered against the company since it began collecting ground-level images of streets and features across the United States and around the World.”
Street View is a Google Maps product that provides a panoramic, launched in the US last May, adds street-level pictures of over 40 U.S. cities and their surrounding suburbs. The public in such areas are usually clearly identifiable.
A fleet of cars fixed with cameras have been trawling the streets of more than 20 American cities, taking pictures of the pavements to provide a complete visual map of the area. But the cameras also take photographs of any person who happens to be walking by at the time. While this has brought about disagreement among privacy campaigners in the US, it could result in serious legal problems in countries such as France with strict privacy laws.
Though the case in point on the subject certainly establishes that walking down the street and the exterior of your house visible from the street are not ‘private,’ most people are still leery of having their pictures posted on Google Maps as they walked down the road.
However, Google is expecting to avoid a conflict with European privacy campaigners as it prepares to launch its controversial Street View service this side of the Atlantic later in the year, by introducing new technology that blurs the faces of people its cameras inadvertently snap while scanning the streets.
The blurring technology, which will be in retrospect applied to all existing Street View images and incorporated in all future releases of the popular mapping feature, is intended to mollify concerns about the potentially intrusive nature of the service.
The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google’s image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.
“The new technology, which blurs any person’s face recorded by Street View cameras, is debuting first on the program’s Manhattan map system.”
The pedestrians and drivers snapped by Google now have their faces distorted in a fuzz of anonymity – although some people could potentially still be identified by the clothes they wear.
Google started testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.
Dealing with privacy–both legal requirements and social norms–is hard but necessary, Hanke said.
“It is a legitimate issue,” he said. He compared 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. We see that and try to let it play out.”
Resentment has risen particularly from areas with harsher privacy laws where Google plans to introduce Street View, like Europe and Canada, though the company promises to honor all local privacy laws.
A Pittsburg couple prosecuted Google for allegedly photographing images on a private drive in April, but it is legal to take photos from public streets in the United States. However, standards vary.
“A just balance needs to be found between what can be publicized, in respect to the principles of freedom of expression and of information, and what has to be safeguarded from excessive public curiosity, so as to avoid infringing the individual’s right to privacy and right to his or her picture,” the French embassy observes.
Amidst the problem, Google has tried to remove all possibly offensive images and has allowed people to request that images of themselves, their homes, and their cars be removed.
“At Google, we take our users’ privacy very seriously,” said Google product manager Andrew Foster on the Google Australia blog.
“We will be including face-blurring technology in the Australian and New Zealand versions of Street View,” Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin said.
“Google has certainly taken some steps in the right direction,” said Dr Dan Svantesson, the chair of the APF’s internet subcommittee and an assistant professor at Bond University’s faculty of law. “But there is certainly more than can be done.”
He said that though the image blurring would go a long way towards resolving a large majority of the potential privacy issues, there was room – for instance – to improve the complaints and take down process.
Street View images are now pored over by hordes of spotters around the world who look for oddities and anything else that is likely to embarrass or amuse. A number of blogs and websites now specialize in news about Street View.
Although there is no solid business after Street View, the free service is being used by real estate agents, small businesses and tourist authorities to boost their services and offerings.
Google is famous for making services with no obvious commercial application. The idea is that, down the track, a way might be found to have the service earn its keep. Google thinks its technology has struck the right technology balance in general.
“It does a good job of figuring that out. It uses a variety of technologies to filter,” Hanke said, though it is yet “not perfect.”