Can a student solve Google Street View’s privacy problem?

On Monday, a computer science grad student called Arturo Flores and his professor Serge Belongie announced that they have developed software which eliminates people from Google Street View.

Over the past few years, Google Street View has come under fire from privacy groups for publishing images of the location of cars’ number plates and in some cases, distinguishable faces. After receiving thousands of complaints, Google decided to introduce a system that blurs the faces of people captured by the Google Street View camera; however there remain many identifiable features such as body-shape and clothing.

Flores and Belongie’s findings have been published in a research paper called “Removing pedestrians from Google Street View images.” This very clever software is described to create ‘ghost-free mosaics’ that ultimately remove pedestrians from the original image. The software isn’t perfect and does leave a slight blur due to matching redundant pixels from a different photograph of the same location. Professor Belongie states that ‘An artist using Photoshop could make a more aesthetically pleasing result.’

Although Google has stated that this project is definitely of interest to them, no one knows whether they will implement this software or not. It could potentially generate a torrent of requests for people to be entirely removed.

Let us know what you think! Will Google use this software to settle their ongoing privacy battles or will it create even more problems for the internet giants?