Google Street View Not Showing Faces Anymore

Since Google Maps introduced Street View, the Mountain View company was assaulted by criticism because some of the users sustained this functions shows a little bit too much information about them. For example, some people said that that the Street View photos reveal details from their houses although they are captured from the street. But what's more important is that Google's imagery also captured numerous US residents that shouldn't appear in the pictures. That's why the search giant created a so-called Street View image removal request that was quite hard to use. If you haven't heard about it yet, this is in short its 'story': you were required to send all sorts of details such as a copy of your ID and other information in order to prove that you're the person in the photo.

According to Elinor Mills from CNET, the Mountain View company quietly changed the policy and is now blurring only the faces of the persons appearing in photos, the procedure being easier. Now, almost anybody can request the removal of someone's face even if he's not the one appearing in the picture. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, confirmed those changes, as CNET reports.

"It was definitely a big policy change inside. We looked at it and we thought that's really silly because that's not the point of this product. The purpose is to show what the stores look like, what houses look like. If someone says, 'Hey, there's a face here,' ... it doesn't matter whose face it is. We've evolved our policy there to be such that (when) a person's face is seen or a license plate is seen ... when we're alerted to those we are actually taking the panoramas down and blurring the faces and blurring the license plates and then restoring them," Marissa Mayer said according to the same source.