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Google May Blur Canadian Faces and License Plates
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Sep 30, 2007 03:56 AM
from the blur-me-blur-me dept.
from the blur-me-blur-me dept.
KingK writes "Reuters reports that Google is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers. But the company said it would probably blur people's faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws."
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Your Rights Online: Interpol Unscrambles Doctored Photo In Manhunt 370 comments
jackpot777 writes in with an AP story out of Paris reporting that Interpol has distributed photos of a man suspected of sexually exploiting children. The images were recovered from pictures taken off the Internet in which the man's face had been blurred using something like Photoshop's Filter > Distort > Twirl tool. German police were able to recover recognizable images of the man, whose identity and nationality are not known. Interpol would not discuss the techniques used to recover the images. jackpot777 writes: "It does show one interesting facet of internet privacy that has also been noted with topics ranging from reading blurred check numbers in images to Google's plan to blur out license plate and face data for Street View. And that is: blurring is not the same as completely obscuring. As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features."
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Draw attention. (Score:4, Funny)
Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
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In case it's not legal I guess they need to find a way to solve it, or just not publish any photos from such countries.
Also I where thinking like seconds appart (thought that will not remove cars which stand still), not hours.
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Or they could, shock horror, do the non-evil thing and blur faces and number plates for every country, as opposed to waiting to be forced to think about privacy by a particular country's laws.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully without breaking the NDA, I should mention that people at Google looked at me strangely when I suggested that they blur faces on street view. They couldn't understand why the privacy implications of such a service are a problem, as what they are doing is technically legal in the USA. However, when people are posting images of random people picking their noses or something on Digg for millions to gawk at (and such things have appeared even on the Digg front page from time to time), there's a problem - it can ruin someone's reputation for a rather stupid reason if the person is identified. To me, that's evil. To them, fixing it should be the cautious thing to do so they don't get sued (weren't they already involved in a lawsuit for this?), even if it happens to jive with their morals.
I don't know if the "don't be evil" thing is practiced as rigorously by the individual employees there as the company would like you to believe. Creating nifty things seems to win out over most moral considerations; at least, this was the impression I got while I was there. Nifty things are good, but people should think about how their technology is going to be used rather than just what they could make.
Parent
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
FUCK YOU! YOU DAMN COMMIE! GET OUT OF USA! (Score:4, Funny)
VOTE GEORGE W. BUSH in 2008!
Write in the man!
Parent
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That and toplessness.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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But if women ever go topless outside of mosquito season, watching them should be rewarding (.Y.)
-b.
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Re:That and toplessness.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Court of Appeals of New York ruled in 1992 that exposure of a bare female breast violates this law only when it takes place in a commercial context.
Okay, so no nude hookers, I get it.
Parent
Privacy Commissioner is completely wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is just plain wrong on this. Laughably wrong. Obviously wrong. 100%, "no-doubt-about-it" wrong.
As a Canadian, I am *embarrassed* that a company like Google is going to be forced to blur over everyones face or possibly even not extend coverage to Canada because of the wrong opinion of one middle-aged woman.
The operative part is this:
"Canada's privacy law prohibits the commercial use of personal data without permission from the individual
All perfectly reasonable right? Of course, but only when it comes to "personal information." The act envisions protecting things such as your bank accounts, your school and work records, and all those other things that any normal person refers to as "personal information." That's the intention of the law as written.
and here is Jennifer's mistake:
Stoddart says her office "... considers images of individuals that are sufficiently clear to allow an individual to be identified to be personal information within the meaning of [the act]."
This is exactly the same, as the whining we heard from nervous "sensitive" people in the US when street view was introduced there. Many intelligent people pointed out that there was no reason to obscure faces, license plates etc., because they weren't "your" information or "personal information." They were merely the result of what any public person standing on that spot could see at any given time and in fact, just the same as any holiday snap taken by any citizen.
Jennifer Stoddart is one of those "nervous" types of people with a strange idea of what "personal information" is. The intent of the privacy law in Canada was never that a shot of someone standing on a street corner is their "personal information" that's just Jennifer's interpretation, and that is the flaw in the argument. She is just wrong on her opinion that this is personal information.
For instance, if such images *were* personal information, then all street surveillance cameras would be illegal or unconstitutional by the same act (they are not in fact they are all over up here). One could argue that cameras in banks are illegal by the same measure. Certainly the cameras mounted in police cars, and the (very common up here) use of hand held cameras by police to monitor crowds also illegal.
There is nothing wrong with our privacy laws, it's just one person's mistaken interpretation of what constitutes "personal information" that is at fault here. Unfortunately, a lot of people will have to go through a lot of grief because of one STUPID person's "interpretation" of the law.
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Why not do the same in the U.S.? (Score:5, Interesting)
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p.s. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE SWITCH OFF THAT FUCKING DELAY BETWEEN POSTS!
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I don't know, this seems like a prime task for Amazon's mturk [wikipedia.org]. How much can someone do in an hour? At $1.20/hr, that comes to
p.s. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE SWITCH OFF THAT FUCKING DELAY BETWEEN POSTS!
Sure, once they turn off advertising for subscribers
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Re:Why not do the same in the U.S.? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Why not do the same in the U.S.? (Score:4, Insightful)
Everybody knows that the US is one of those countries where you have to vote for either wing of the governing two-wing status-quo-conserving party if you want your vote to count, and where the government has a security police that can take away your rights at the flip of a hat if they decide to consider you a threat.
Why would the US suddenly have strong privacy rights? How would that facilitate the work of the government's security police?
Of course in the US these things are sugar-coated in somewhat different ways than in other countries that have similar arrangements. In the US the terminology is emotionally charged in ways that will appeal specifically to the American temperament. So the government's security police is called Department of Homeland Security, and the suspicions that take away your right will invariably mention Terrorism.
But that's just sugar-coating over the same old ugly mess.
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There are massive advances being made in recognising faces -- i.e. combine Facebook or Flickr with a tagged photo of someone, and you could then find them on the street in New York in the Google picture. That's why people have the right not to be photographed and have their image broadcast.
(Thankfully, I'm in the UK, and the EU and the
Using what filter? (Score:4, Interesting)
If Google does the same you would need to find a photo that is probably of someone you have an image of once (or at worst a few times - hardly a problem when you consider the collaborative effort available) and the set up a un-blurring filter that would work with all their images.
These problems have all been solved - using a cryptographic RNG as a noise source for example - but they require more computing power and so it would be very tempting to save money by taking a short cut.
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Faces: oh, my goodness, faces are a different story. Facial recognition is deeply wired into the human brain and human behavior, one of the first skills an infant learns is whom their parent's faces belong to an
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The theory being put forward is that if the filter is not a 'one way' filter, then it wouldn't be too hard to get the actual original data back again. eg if the filter worked on a 2 x 2 matrix, and it said 'swap the points at 0,0 and 1,1, and the points at 0,1 and 1,0', then all of the original data is still there, just moved around. If you can figure out the translation (eg if you have a copy of the original and the blurred copy) then you can reconstruct it. If, ho
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The example isn't a photo, but I don't think it's inconceivable to apply similar techniques on blurred photographs.
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Second of all, those digital squares are a bit large; while you could manage to perhaps create a fuzzy, oddly greyish looking bit of genetalia, it would lack any realistic detail.
Yes, but in case of video/film, you have multiple frames, and if something is moving linearly (but not deforming or rotating) in a given direction- or alternately if the camera is panning in the opposite direction- then if the block coordinates are fixed relative to the screen, you should theoretically be able to get higher resolution in the direction of motion using some maths.
For example, in frame 1, block (0,0) is made up from object coordinates (0,0), (1,0), (2,0), (3,0) and block (1,0) from coords (
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You realise that several (Japanese, I think) blurring algorithms are specifically designed to be reversible [vector.co.jp], right?
Properly designed blurring filters cannot be reversed so easily! Alternately, instead of blurring, they could just use black squares [dheera.net] to cover stuff up.
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What about Canadians abroad? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe Google should adapt their filter software so it blurs the face of anyone with a Canadian flag patched attached to themselves ;-)
Do the CIA get a reverse filter? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not paste other faces on ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google should find people who are willing for their faces to be used this way. Using the same face would be kind of disturbing, so a selection of faces would be needed, perhaps to roughly match the face that is being replaced (hair colour, race, sex, ...).
Think of the fun that we could have: a kind of Google powered Where's Wally [thegreatpi...hunt.co.uk] .
There could even be a market for this: budding politicians, wannabe starlets who might pay to have their face become recognised or become familiar.
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Canada does America better. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Canada does America better. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
How? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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A better method than blurring (Score:2)
A better method than blurring, and irreversible, is to substitute someone else's face, scaled to the same size. They could use CmdrTaco's mug shot.
Vacation pictures? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's up to the person whose privacy has been violated to make a complaint and prosecute though.
The thing that separates
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So my vacation pictures from our visit to Canada that I posted on my web site are somehow illegal?
Vacation pictures are not illegal because they are information collected by individuals for non-commercial uses:
Limit
(2) This Part does not apply to
(a) any government institution to which the Privacy Act applies;
(b) any individual in respect of personal information that the individual collects, uses or discloses for personal or domestic purposes and does not collect, use or disclose for any other purpose; [justice.gc.ca] or
(c) any organization in respect of personal information that the organization collects, uses or disc
I just want to say (Score:4, Funny)
But that's not all (Score:4, Funny)
license plates (Score:3, Insightful)
Two companies provided data for street view (Score:3, Informative)
That second company has dropped the resolution down so far that you can't recognise the people unless they are standing on the roof of the camera-car AND has taken their data set and scrubbed it of images that easily identify other people and vehicles where they have been close enough to recognise.
This second company is the one that is providing the data to Google in Canada and 99% of the US. Check out any city BUT San Francisco on Street View.
This is a NON-Story