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bovine protection
Google Street View decided to blur this cow's face to protect its identity
Google admitted that its software had been “overzealous” in doing this.
SINCE IT CAPTURES images of public spaces, Google Street View usually blurs out the faces of people and number places to protect people’s identities.
It uses software to do this automatically, but sometimes it can go a step too far as one unsuspecting animal found out.
When capturing street view images in a park in Cambridge last summer, Google’s software decided to blur out the face of a cow which wandered onto the path.
The action was spotted by The Guardian’s Opinion Editor David Shariatmadari. Its face is only blurred at that particular point, moving up or down the path will reveal the cow’s face, undoing the software’s hard work.
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Naturally, this led to many people making numerous puns and jokes.
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It’s not the first time an animal’s face has been blurred to protect its identity. Back in May, British police blurred out the faces of two sheep in a pun-heavy announcement. The photo had the caption “the identity of the lambs has been protected due to their age and vulnerability (it’s a joke!)”.
When asked about it, a spokesperson for Google told the BBC: ”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.
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