Hacker News Reader

The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize.

As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash. As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper & start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from the street will just become less private over time.

View on HN

And quality blurring may be tricky to implement. On Google Street View, street name plates and road signs are often blurred, because the algorithm is not sure if they are licence plates or not, and blurs too much. For Open Street View, this would defeat the purpose of having the photos.

"Because it's hard" is not a very good reason to neglect doing something when you know it's the right thing to do.

The right thing to do would have been to avoid publishing these photos until you have the means to anonymise them properly, or to use a service like Google Vision and pay the small fee to get someone else to do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com