Face-blurring technology raises privacy questions

Interesting Article but if you've got nothing to hide why the hell would you worry.

31 January 2009 by Paul Marks

SHOULD we modify our conception of privacy thanks to the seemingly unstoppable spread of CCTV surveillance networks? Jack Brassil thinks so. He's a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard's laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, who is testing a technology called Cloak that aims to limit the extent of privacy invasions. "Rather than prohibit surveillance, our system seeks to discourage surveillers distributing video without the authorization of the surveilled," he says.

Cloak has two key requirements. First, CCTV users, such as municipal councils and businesses, would have to sign up to a system that electronically obscures the faces of people who do not want their pictures to be published in video footage that is passed to others. The list of such people would be akin to the national "do-not-dial" lists designed to prevent cold-calling, Brassil says.

Second, the person opting in to Cloak needs to carry a "privacy enabling device" - most conveniently a phone with GPS capability. This wirelessly beams the user's position and velocity to a central server which forwards the data to the CCTV's control centre. Image processing software then uses the subject's trajectory to identify and obscure their face in the CCTV footage if it is to be distributed. In Hewlett-Packard's simulations, the technology is workable, even in dense crowds.

The idea raises broad societal and legal questions, however. "I don't think its objectives are right at all," says privacy analyst Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. "People shouldn't have to opt in to get privacy protection. And this system actively invades your privacy because it tells the service where you are at all times."

Brassil concedes that his proposed solution may not suit everyone, but says the important point is the discussion of privacy. Brown also notes that there are transatlantic legal differences to contend with. In Europe, data protection laws prevent surveillance videos being passed on while only a few states in the US have such legislation. He says another way forward is to encourage engineers to design privacy into technologies from the start.

Brown will have his work cut out, says Brassil, who is to publish his work as part of a book on video surveillance later this year. "Technology is advancing far faster than our ability to understand its privacy implications," he says.