Google erases faces and car numbers from Map Street View

Google has listened to the opinion of privacy advocates and agreed to remove all personal data from the Google Maps map service, namely, the faces of people and the numbers of cars in the Street View photos. Previously, Google stood on the fact that only users who recognized themselves could ask to remove themselves from photos, but now the company has made fundamental changes in the rules for using the service, so now people and numbers are removed at the first request of anyone, even a stranger. As Marissa Mayer reported yesterday, these changes were made back in June, ten days after opening the service, but nobody knew about them until yesterday.

Street View service has become a real boon for voyeurs and private detectives: for example, in the photographs you could see the face of a contented man coming out of a strip club, car numbers near the alcohol bar and other little secrets (see private photos from Street View ) . Now the pleasure will be less.

For three months, bloggers heartily postebili fun frames that accidentally fell into the public access. “We looked at it and thought it was real idiocy, because the purpose of our product is not at all like that,” said Marissa Mayer. - The service is created to show what houses and shops look like. If someone says, “Hey, there's someone's face”, then what difference does it have, whose face is there?

As you know, the Street View layer on Google Maps is ordinary photos taken with panoramic digital cameras. This is a joint project of Google and the cyberpunk company Immersive Media. Powerful high-resolution panoramic cameras with a 360-degree viewing angle, which drive around the city on the roofs of vans and cars ( exterior ), are used to capture the territory.