In the wake of claims from Senator Stephen Conroy a little over a year ago about Google committing the biggest privacy breach in history in the midst of collecting updated data for their StreetView service – (which the Privacy Commissioner later basically dismissed as rubbish) – as a goodwill gesture, Google promised to make sure that people’s faces and other identifiable markings such as vehicle registrations would be blurred out.
Take a look at this image from Street View I just found here, click for larger version:
It’s funny enough – (but fair enough, since the face detection algorithm is ultimately designed to detect faces) – that it blurred out a face on a poster, but curious that it didn’t blur out the identical face on the identical poster immediately next to the first one.
Now, of course algorithms like this are never likely to be “perfect” – but I do worry a bit when two – (for all intents and purposes) – identical pieces of the image are treated differently, and it does make me wonder how many “real” faces got missed.
Food for thought.