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16th Sep 2016

Here’s why Google street view is blurring cows faces

It's all for privacy.

Megan Roantree

They’re all about privacy.

Privacy is a very important issue nowadays, having so much of your information on the likes of Facebook and Google means it’s important to be a safe a possible.

Facebook have various settings you can add to your profile to make it safer, while Google, specifically Maps, have had to take privacy very seriously too.

On Google street view, you will often see people’s faces blurred out as well as the number plates on cars to protect citizens.

But one twitter use spotted another safety measure for the bovine breed.

A journalist with the Guardian US tweeted a picture and captioned it: “Great to see Google takes cow privacy seriously”

The reason behind it pretty simple. Google is programmed to blur any face it finds, and it doesn’t discriminate.

A spokesperson for Google spoke to the BBC about the pictures of the cows and had some fun with his answer:

“We thought you were pulling the udder one when we herd the moos, but it’s clear that our automatic face-blurring technology has been a little overzealous.

Of course, we don’t begrudge this cow milking its five minutes of fame.”

We’re guessing we’re going to start seeing plenty of dogs and horses with pixelated faces too.

Lead image via Megan Roantree

Topics:

Cow,google