Google protects the identity of anime characters

Uh oh, could this be a step in the grand scheme of “think of the children” to eventually outlaw eroges?
Statues today, drawings tomorrow!

Sure they protected this one statue, but there’s no guarantee that there are dozens of statues out there exposed to the world. It’s such a scary violation of privacy.

I say the Japanese people should pre-empt Google’s harmful policies by a) wearing masks at all times to protect their identities from strangers, and b) placing masks or even black hoods over defenseless cartoon statues.

This is important because of the well-known Three Stages of Privacy Violation:

1) Someone takes your picture on the street and posts it on the Internet
2) ??????????????????????????
3) You die.

Of course Google censors the anime statues faces. The process of blurring faces in Google Street View pictures is done automatically, due to the sheer volume of data. The algorithm used tries to detect faces by certain criteria and has to decide in a reasonable time whether a speck of pixels is a face or not. It is not so important to distinguish between human and artificial faces and it’s way better to have a few false positives than to be sued because some faces aren’t blurred.
By the way, the KFC guys’ statue usually is also being blurred, as are advertisements showing faces. The algorithm works quite well .:)