Google now zaps faces, license plates on Map Street View
Google has gotten a lot of flack from privacy advocates for photographing faces and license plate numbers and displaying them on the Street View in Google Maps. Originally, the company said only people who identified themselves could ask the company to remove their image.
But Google has quietly changed that policy, partly in response to criticism, and now anyone can alert the company and have an image of a license plate or a recognizable face removed, not just the owner of the face or car, says Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.
"It's a good policy for users and also clarifies the intent of the product," she said in an interview following her keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday.
The policy change was made about 10 days after the launch of the product in late May, but was not publicly announced, according to Mayer. The company is removing images only when someone notifies them and not proactively, she said. "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," she said. "If someone says, 'Hey, there's a face here,' ... it doesn't matter whose face it is."
Asked how many removal requests the company has received, a Google representative said, "Not even dozens."
There was some confusion when Mayer first mentioned the policy change during her keynote. She had said: "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."
Later, she clarified that the company does not blur images, but removes them entirely. There are enough overlapping images in a street view that the fact that one image was removed is not apparent to the viewer, she said, explaining her use of the word "blur."
Google is using its own camera-equipped vehicles to take high-resolution images, which enables clear shots of details like faces, in San Francisco and San Diego. Privacy advocates have expressed concern that people may not even know that an identifiable photo of their face or license plate is online and suggested that blurring faces would be a good solution.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.
http://streetviewgallery.corank.com
If Google is really serious about ensuring that people can protect their privacy and security by requesting take-down of images, they should add a direct link entitled ?Request Take Down? or ?Flag for Removal? to the top of each Google Street View image.
Google has reported that very few people have asked for an image to be removed. This is likely due in part to the fact that there is no direct link from a Street View image to request take-down of a photo for privacy or security concerns. Individuals must know to click on the ?Street View Help? link at the top of any image and then scroll down to the bottom of that box and click on ?Report Inappropriate Image.? This is just not intuitive. There should just be a direct link from each image.
See our blog at www.aclunc.org/techblog for more information about our privacy concerns with Street View.
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by PicBuddy
August 27, 2008 4:58 PM PDT
- Who cares if it shows faces and license plates? Any time you go out in public your face and license plate are showing. Doesn't harm anything, just causes some paranoid technology lamers to get all freaked out when there's nothing to be scared of. People who see ghosts in the shadows. Hahah. Don't look under your bed! There's a boogieman there! Hahaha.
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by RideTheWalrus
February 20, 2009 8:51 AM PST
- Yes if you happen to see somebody driving down a street you can see their face and license plate - but you would have to be at that place at that time. With advancing technology like this you can search for somebody's license plate and find where they've been at any time. This is way worse than the former.
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(6 Comments)Ask yourself my google is doing this at all. The *only* possible application this could possibly have is to track where a license plate has been.
Quite frankly, that's none of your business.