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

[Niels Elgaard Larsen]

Nick Whitelegg:
> 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.


That sounds great.

> 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.


Hard to judge without examples.
Understand-ai has two examples on github, but that is very clear images.

You will probably have to let users add and remove blurs.
That is what Mapillary do.

> 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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-- 
Niels Elgaard Larsen