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Google begins blurring faces in Street View | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Posted on: May 14, 2008
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Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.
(Credit: Google)
BURLINGAME, Calif.–Google has begun testing face-blurring technology for its Street View service, responding to privacy concerns from the search giant’s all-seeing digital camera eye.
The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google’s image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference here.
Google has begun testing the technology in Manhattan, the company announced on its LatLong blog. Ultimately, though, Hanke expects it to be used more broadly.
Dealing with privacy–both legal requirements and social norms–is hard but necessary, Hanke said.
“It’s a legitimate issue,” he said. He likened the issues some have with Street View to the ones that took place when Google introduced aerial views to Google Maps. It took time for the public, regulators, and Google to get comfortable with the feature, but, “It needs that debate. We see that and try to let it play out.”
Google faces human rights votes
Posted on: May 10, 2008
It cannot be easy to be the company that set out with the motto: “don’t be evil”.
Especially not now.
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Google – whose shares currently trade at almost $600 (£300), more than $100 above its level a year ago – is facing two shareholder motions at its annual general meeting on Thursday.
Both insist the company needs to do more to fight censorship and support human rights.
The top three executives at Google control about two-thirds of the voting shares, so neither motion will get a majority.
But that is not the point of the exercise, according to Amnesty International, which will be proposing the first motion at the meeting.
“A lot of shareholders vote and don’t attend the meeting but they may pay attention to what happens,” says Amy O’Meara, director of business and human rights at Amnesty International USA.
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 We see technology companies continue to have very vague policies around human rights and frequent violations of their own policies  Jack Ucciferri, Harrington Investments
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“We’re really looking at it as an opportunity to have an audience to hear what we think about these issues right now and to impress on Google that they really need to move much faster on these issues.”
The internet censorship motion originally came from the New York City Comptroller, which looks after the pensions of city employees.
It calls on Google to “use all legal means to resist censorship” and to make it clearer to users if it has “acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access”.
Google in China
Most of the criticism relates to Google’s Chinese language service Google.cn, which was launched in April 2006.
The company argued that it was better to agree to the Chinese government’s censorship rules than to refuse to service Chinese customers altogether.
Google believes the motion ignores what it has done for online freedom
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Since then, companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have got together with Amnesty and other organisations and experts to form a multi stakeholder initiative on internet and human rights.
But Amnesty says that much more needs to be done.
“There are often national laws or opportunities within the law in China to stand up against requests by officials to do this kind of censorship and the companies like Google have just complied very easily,” Ms O’Meara says.
“They haven’t even tried from what we can tell.”
Google’s defence
Google is opposing the motion, on the grounds that its operations in China are already improving transparency and helping Chinese people access information.
It argues that adopting the proposal would hurt its users and business because it would have to close down Google.cn.
In the past year, it has also been trying to persuade US trade officials to treat censorship like any other barrier to trade.
A similar resolution at last year’s shareholders’ meeting received 3.8% of shareholder votes.
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