Subverting Street View
Wednesday, 24th December 2008 by Alex Turnbull
Despite Google's oh-so-clever "face-blurring" technology, sometimes people's faces don't get recognised by the system, and make it onto the Street View imagery unaltered.
Here at the Colosseum in Rome, a couple found a perfect way to fool the camera... by engaging in a steamily passionate kiss!
This kiss was so passionate in fact, that someone at Google appears to have been charged with manually pixellating the offending image - presumably to save us the embarrassment of having to see a couple kissing.
Like no-one's ever seen that on the Internet before...
What is interesting though, is that they bothered to pixellate the image themselves, rather than (as we've seen many times before) just remove the image completely. Presumably this is thanks to the fact that the Colosseum is one of Italy's most famous tourist destinations.
The moral of the story? If you want to be seen on Google Street View doing something outrageous, make sure you're in front of a hugely recognisable landmark.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
They didn’t pixellate it for us, they pixellated it for them, so they’d be less recognizable.
Here is the original picture:
http://streetviewgallery.corank.com/tech/story/google-Street-View-Captures-a-Kissing-
I read somewhere that the Canadian government at one point was threatening to ban Google from photographing there unless they blurred out all faces and license plates. So maybe Google is concerned with legal or regulatory problems involving “privacy.”
outrageous, this kissing in public.