[OSM-talk] Face and license blurring (GDPR territories)

[Nick Whitelegg]

... sorry, this sentence maybe could be misconstrued. "however I now have a collaborator to work on exploring an open source panos platform."

This is very much a joint-effort project between myself and the person I'm collaborating with, I want to make that clear.

Thanks,
Nick


________________________________
From: Nick Whitelegg
Sent: 06 October 2020 21:41
To: talk at openstreetmap.org <talk at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Face and license blurring (GDPR territories)

Hi,

Apologies if this is only tangentially OSM related, but I thought I'd ask here to try and get some expert advice.

As you may know, Mapillary has been bought by Facebook and there has been interest in developing, or at least starting to develop/actively researching the possibility of, some sort of open source alternative. I have been developing OpenTrailView (opentrailview.org), however I now have a collaborator to work on exploring an open source panos platform.

The main question I have relates to the very necessary privacy steps that must be taken, in particular face and license plate blurring. I have experimented with various libraries using various datasets and models, and have found that the understand.ai Anonymizer (https://github.com/understand-ai/anonymizer), which advertises itself as something specifically aimed at implementing the privacy protections needed to comply with the GDPR, seems to be working the best.

It detects faces and license plates in clear view on panoramas, which can then be blurred.

My question, then, is what to do about people, or cars, which are further away from the camera? In these cases, the algorithm does not necessarily detect the face or license plate, but on the other hand in general the faces and license plates are not clearly visible, or identifiable, in any case.

So in summary, the tool blurs clearly visible faces or license plates, but in general does not blur those which are not clearly visible.

Apologies once again that this is only tangentially related to OSM (OpenTrailView uses OSM to connect panos together, so not completely unrelated) but it is very much an open geodata issue, so I thought I'd ask to get feedback.

I am in the UK and the server is in Germany (Hetzner), so GDPR would apply.

Thanks,
Nick

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