After getting sued by a Pennsylvania couple for invasion of privacy, Google replied that in today’s day and age, there can be no expectation of privacy (even though the couple’s house is located on a private road “clearly marked as private property”). “Today’s satellite image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist,” says Google.

Perhaps in light of this remarkably stupid remark, NewScientistTech reports that “Google has begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces.” Columbia University’s CAVE Project has developed “software [that] randomly selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes, nose and mouth are used, resulting in a composite image of the two people. ‘It matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image resolution,’ says Neeraj Kumar [of the CAVE Project]. ‘The selected faces are aligned to common 3D coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the target image.’

Other uses: “Aside from Street View, the system could be used to obscure the faces of military personnel or eyewitnesses to crime.” Check out a couple of fucked-up examples here (including a better version of Denzel Washington).

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5. Google and Its Global Archive: Infringing and Making Private Information Public