Bovine privacy

Google’s Street View cameras don’t seem to discriminate between humans and animals

A screenshot of Google Street View of Coe Fen that shows the blurred face of a cow. Courtesy Google

With technology tracking our online activities all the time, it’s easy to think that digital privacy is a thing of the past. But Google recently showed it takes this issue so seriously that it even protects the identities of animals. Or at least that is one interpretation of why a cow grazing on the banks of the River Cam in Cambridge, England, shows up in Google Street View with its face blurred.

Other cows along the river did not have their faces blurred, which raises the question about what was so special about this animal. While this is obviously an error by Google’s face-blurring computer algorithm, the incident is a reminder of how much information is out there and how the world is being mapped. It’s also proof that even with an image database as massive as Street View’s to learn from, the algorithms still aren’t perfect.

In this particular case, it was probably a decision to protect the identity of this cow that was running away from the “moo-fia”.