Google Blurring Street View Faces

Google has started to automatically blur faces on their Street View imagery.  Using a facial recognition algorithm, Google has started to blur faces in New York City.  From the Google Lat Long blog:

We’re also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making — working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery.

The move is an effort to address privacy concerns in the United States and to be in compliance with regulations as Street View is expanded into other countries.