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Comment by dbrgn | Hacker News Reader

Exciting! Now instead of waiting for the street view car to pass through your neighborhood, you can add the pictures yourself!

I wonder how privacy issues are handled though. Is any blurring of car numbers or faces being done or planned?

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If you check the presentation, there is a question about this and they say that they support it. Here it is https://youtu.be/XuGjahx8CFc?t=27m32s

It is, but I've seen many unblurred faces. On this one the car wheel on the left is blurred out though: http://openstreetview.org/details/10510/4664.

Why blur faces when it should be possible to completely remove people? At least eventually.

It's a lot easier to detect and blur faces than to detect people, remove them and then try and fill in what was removed.

Now I wonder if phones have been made with some kind of z-sensing to provide depth mapping for the image. You could share your data and cross corelate like Microsoft picture merging technology.

Google's Tango project is working on depth sensing. They don't expect (in a UX sense) it to work over longer distances because of power requirements.

https://developers.google.com/tango/overview/depth-perceptio...

Right; I forgot this project. Can IR be power efficient for city/boulevard scale depth ?

I think power will always be an issue for something built into a phone. If it could run off the car, the power considerations would likely be irrelevant.

I guess nothing much will happen with it, a patchwork of point clouds is less interesting than a patchwork of photos.

Mapillary has done some work on recovering a point cloud just from correspondence between the photos.

http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html

Sure, handhelds have bounded power. I don't know how depth sensing tech work but I expect it to be power hungry. Question is can it be LCD/WiFi demanding or would it kill the average battery after 10 shots.

To a first approximation, it's the same kind of power as using the camera flash with every shot. It's just a "flash" that's not in the visible spectrum.

So for a car-mounted system surveying streets, the power would be comparable to having headlights on all the time.

>Is any blurring of car numbers or faces being done or planned?

Why would that be necessary? All the pictures were taken in public so there's no expectation of privacy.

That is a very American-centric privacy perspective and does not apply to most of the world.

Freedom of panorama is quite widespread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama (And it is expected that it will be part of the harmonized data protection law that the EU is currently planning.)

Also, at least in Germany, the right to your own image does not apply when "persons only appear as props next to a landscape or other location". (Whatever that means is usually decided by the judge AFAIK.) Source: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/__23.html

The law in your second link explicitly spells out that this is only valid as long as there is no "justified interest" of one of the people visible that the image isn't published. Which is a pretty serious limitation, and basically means you have to review and judge every image individually. In practice it's explicitly not "happened in public, no expectation of privacy".

If you pay some attention you're probably going to be ok, but the "probably" is the annoying thing for individual actors. (E.g. I think Google lost a few lawsuits in Europe and Canada due to people being recognizable even with their face blurred. Annoying and expensive for Google, a criminal conviction and really expensive if it successfully hits an individual.)

Good thing for an open, collaborative project is that you are not Google and can be more aggressive with filtering questionable images. Google seemed to value having complete coverage of areas quite a bit, open projects don't have to as much. Some data is better than none, and holes can be closed later, step by step.

Freedom of panorama is a term from copyright, rather than data protection. It's primarily about designed buildings - are you allowed to make/share a photo of a building where the architect (!) does not allow it... It sounds absurd like this, but the arguments against it are not that easily ignored. Public interest should outweigh it though. At EU level the issue is that the freedom of panorama does explicitly not exist in some countries, now the laws get a bit more harmonised at EU level and the new rules may/may not force some countries to re establish freedom of panorama. Let's hope the European Commission puts it's foot down and actually makes it obligatory, but chances are that whatever the commission proposes will be ripped apart when member states have to discuss & find a compromise.

Even in America, it hardly seems universal in the social sphere; Glassholes didn't take their nickname from spying on private property.

start recording people in public and some percentage of time you are going to get assaulted. Multiply that percentage by 10 for police officers.

People have a reasonable expectation that their personal data (their face, their car number plates) are not going to be gathered and processed without their knowledge or permission, and that if it is going to be gathered and processed it's going to be proportionate to the need.

Unblurring is likely to be legally problematic in EU.

That's not as simple in many parts of the world. Hiding faces is a good starting point to avoid trouble with local laws.

> All the pictures were taken in public so there's no expectation of privacy

Just because you can go around publicising random people's locations, doesn't mean you should.

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