Google attempts to protect identities in Street View feature

By Ed Oswald | Published May 14, 2008, 4:15 PM

Since the debut of Google's Street View in its mapping application, bloggers and curiosity seekers have made it somewhat of a sport to catch folks who may not have wanted their activities photographed.

These unflattering shots then make their rounds across the Internet and range from the somewhat humorous -- such as a bicycle stunt gone wrong or a man captured checking out a few ladies during a stroll at the beach -- they have also been know to catch things that might be less than legal -- including a pair of women who's business on the corner may not be sanguine.

Google's fix for this includes new technology that it is adding into Street View to blur out the faces and protect the identities of those it captures on film. Such technology is necessary for the service to expand elsewhere outside the US.

For example, privacy in public places is stricter in locations such as Europe, Canada and Australia. The Mountain View, Calif. search giant plans to bring Street View to these regions in the near future.

The first area to get the new face-detection algorithm were images in Manhattan, where Google is currently rolling out better panoramic imagery.

"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," it said in a post to the Google LatLong blog on Monday.

Even so, the blurring does not always work as it should, and some noted that faces could still be identified.

"The results are pretty good, although not all the faces are correctly detected," one blog wrote.