Street View Launches Face-Blurring Technology, European Expansion Now Imminent

Since Google rolled out Street View, there has been a lot of controversy around it as people appearing in those high-resolution photos captured by Google pointed to their privacy rights and requested the removal of the pictures. The Mountain View-based company has always been opened to talks and accepted to delete the photos as long as the user who requested it could prove he was the one appearing in them. However, since Street View grew up more and more and more Google cars used to capture high-resolution photos have been spotted around the world, people started talking about a potential expansion on the European market. Just like always, the privacy issue was one of the most important aspects because some European countries have special laws that protect residents from appearing in the photos.

Well, it may seem like the super search giant did it again and managed to develop what seems to be the solution to all privacy complaints issued by the Street View users: a face-blurring technology that would protect people from seeing their faces on Google Maps.

Today, along with improved Street View imagery for Manhattan, Google also debuted a testing version of the face-blurring technology that now protects the faces of the people appearing in Manhattan photos. "We're also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort 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", Andrea Frome, Software Engineer, introduced the new feature.

Yesterday, various reports talked about Google cars spotted in France but most of them pointed to the local laws that give residents the right to protect their privacy and avoid appearing in such services unless they give their authorization. Moreover, some people said that Google would have to hire numerous employees in order to blur all the faces while others considered that a potential European Street View could be avoided. Well, it seems like Google has its own solution and this is the face-blurring technology that both helps the company expand Street View in Europe and avoids hiring new employees for blurring purposes.


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