If they remove images with faces and every image of a license plate, we might start to see a lot of the Google Street View images disappear.

I can see it now, in a dark room operated by a competitor sits a group of huddled computer operators clicking on 'Remove inappropriate image'. MUHAHA :p

"oh! a street! DELETE!Ahahahaha!"

"In other news, traffic to Google Maps from Microsoft's Redmond campus has increased by 1000% in the last two months"

What might be even better than using a face recognition program is for the vans to do several passes, and then meld the photos using pieces captured multiple times (ie buildings), but leaving out any part photographed only once (ie people).

That would eliminate any potential privacy concerns, because if you're on the street long enough for a van to go around the block/city a few times, you don't have much privacy left.

Edward, I was about to suggest that but I realized that to make it effective, the camera has to take the same scene at the same place and orientation as before. It's pretty hard to do if you're on a moving vehicle.

There used to be great face detection tool at snipshot.com, but they removed it recently. It worked great, true face detection was about 99%. The tools is now cached only in this Google archive 64.233.183.104/search?q=cache: ...

I think Google is going to be busy...Check out this huge gallery of Google Street View privacy invasions:

laudontech.com

Eugene
Actually its quite easy for software to recognise the same scene from a diferent (small changes) place.
Then Edward's idea would be great.

I see nothing's changed as yet

Same here, just checked the map, the face is still there. Maybe it will take a litte bit more time before they make the changes (if they will).

Regarding the privacy problems facing the company, I can't help to remember what they said about acting fast on their products. I think that it's a google value to just do things first without thinking too much into the possible problems that they might encounter. As "careless" as it may sound, it did worked for the company for some of its products, as long as the first version is not train wreck. After all, the nature of software as a service makes changes and corrections to web apps easier and more convenient than the convenient software model. And the advantage of delivering quick greatly outweighs the kinks that they encounter in doing so..

  

If you click on the image at Google Maps, you can pan 360 degrees to see other people looking right at the camera!