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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Street View has been Google's most contested launch of 2007. The Associated Press flagged the 'ick' factor back in June, and by June 8 the company was still running a purely reactive policy: only people who could identify themselves in a photo could ask for it to be removed.
What changes with this report is the direction of the burden. Automatic blurring of faces and license plates means Google is filtering its imagery before publication rather than adjudicating individual complaints afterward — a structural concession to the privacy advocates who had made Street View their case study.
First-order effects
- People photographed by Street View cars no longer need to spot themselves and file a self-identification request; obscuring happens upstream, before the imagery goes live on Google Maps.
Second-order effects
- Rivals building street-level imagery now face an expectation — set by the market leader under advocacy pressure — that faces and plates get blurred by default, raising their own processing costs if they ship unfiltered panoramas.
Third-order effects
- If automated anonymization becomes the baseline for mass street photography, regulators and advocates gain a template: identifiable bystanders in public imagery are treated as needing protection by default, not via per-person opt-out.
The trend: Mass street-level imaging is shifting from reactive takedown-on-request to privacy-by-default automated filtering as the cost of public backlash outstrips the cost of blurring.