When I lived in San Francisco I passed the same homeless man pretty much every morning on my way to work.  He was always strategically situated across from the main bus depot in front of a coffee shop.  When Google’s Street View was launch last year – a feature of Google Maps providing street-level photographic views – I visited that street corner (virtually) to see if he was captured when Google’s panoramic cameras photographed the area.  He wasn’t but lots of other people were, and with their faces in full view.  At the time, I thought this was a lawsuit waiting to happen.  Even if these people were in a public place and photographed from public streets – arguably waiving any right of privacy – there were bound to be plenty of eager lawyers interested in suing the behemoth Internet giant and testing the legal waters on this issue.

Of course lawsuits were filed on this issue but, more interestingly, privacy advocates also raised legitimate concerns over public activities that perhaps shouldn’t be on permanent, worldwide display; such as views of men leaving strip clubs, sunbathers in bikinis, parents hitting their children, or johns picking up prostitutes.  In response, Google began blurring people’s faces and allowing users to tag offensive views for removal.  This is the right result.  Even if Google has no legal liability for displaying faces in the crowd and posting them on the Internet (and, to be clear, this legal position is somewhat in doubt), Street View doesn’t benefit from including those faces, and where Google can easily blur them it should.

–Matt