Why are photos of people in public blurred?
<p>If one has no reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, why are faces so often blurred out in photos and video? For example, on Google Earth.</p>

<h2>Costs</h2>
<p>There are hundreds of jurisdictions in the world with various approaches to privacy in public places.</p>
<p>It is simply much cheaper for the publisher to avoid claims in the first place than to hire lawyers to deal with them. Even if the publisher has full legal standing to publish the faces, it would not always be able to recover costs from the failed claimants.</p>
<h2>Minimum unhappiness</h2>
<p>Faces on street views do not add much (if any) value to the service anyway. Conversely, they often upset and make unhappy the owners of the faces.</p>

<h2>Defamation</h2>
<p>Say you are writing an article about someone accused or convicted of fraud. You have one photo of them; showing them, their ex, and an unidentifiable third person.</p>
<p>Publishing the photo unaltered could lead to a defamation claim due to the implication that these people are associates of a criminal or have benefited from their crimes when the ex might have ended the relationship well before the crimes and the third person might be a random person at the party.</p>

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