Basically this, when you watch the news, the faces are not blurred out, those that are just passing by or such but when you use google maps, they blur out peoples faces and such. Both are publicly accessible and I just wonder what the difference is.
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If you’re in a public space you are in public. This means in the UK that your legal rights to privacy are limited. So there’s never been any legal or cultural prohibition on catching people on camera when they’re out in a public space.
In the past, at least, a TV crew would be fairly visible. If you don’t want to be on camera, don’t walk into shot. Resolution would be low, limiting the ability to identify people. Since shots are chosen and reviewed by people. They *should* be careful if they’re filming around any sensitive locations, and might spot anything problematic that’s caught on camera. And something like a new report might be transmitted a couple of times and then be gone. So the potential privacy harms are limited. Or at least were – some of these things are open to question now.
Google Street View has multiple differences. The key one is the scale of data collection. It’s not just an occasional bit of location filming, it’s photos of every single street, every single location. These pictures are permanently available (at least until they’re updated) and much more accessible than a news report. It’s also harder to avoid being caught by a Street View camera – indeed you might well not even know, unless you spot the car(/backpack/other vehicles used).
It may also be worth noting that the relationship between filming in public and the public has grown up over time. Both sides have expectations over what’s acceptable. Google just decided to start doing street view, without any public discussion, and had to be *forced* to blur people’s faces.
Well I’m not sure that the technology to blur live news in real time is necessarily available to all news stations, but even if it is, the real answer is that that technology definitely wasn’t available back when live news first became a thing. This is a case a cultural and institutional inertia, where the way they originally did it was dictated by what technology was available at the time, and then it just never changed because, well, ‘that’s how we’ve always done it’. Back in the day it was much harder to identify people just from a face anyway, especially when it was only going to be shown for a few moments on the live news broadcast and then gone forever unless somebody bothered to record it. But Google was building a brand new kind of media in an area with different capabilities available, so they did things differently.
Depends on the local laws. In some countries privacy laws are stronger. In US it’s generally allowed to film people for the general reporting of news within the current laws.
In Japan for example you will find that news and especially reality shows blur out a lot, sometimes it looks like *everything* except the subjects of the show is a blur. A bit bizarre first time you see it.
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