When blurring licence plates, we blur the normal plates. But what about cases when the registration number has been also painted on the body of the vehicle? Larger trucks often have that, or see this example of a tuktuk, where there’s a yellow licence plate, and the number is also painted on the right side of the vehicle: Mapillary
Should only the plate be blurred, or should we blur also the painted copy?
I also blur such copies and other unique identifiable information. E.g. in Denmark all company cars must have the VAT number (CVR number) in a certain size on the side of the car. I blur that but not name and logo.
Mapillary only goes for license plates and faces.
Thanks. It probably makes sense to blur all licence plate/content occurrences indeed.
I’m not sure about things like VAT numbers - they do not uniquely identify the vehicle, at least not more than a company name, phone or logo would do. I also like to keep my blurs to what Mapillary can feed into the learning algo. That is, it could eventually figure out that something is a copy of a licence plate contents, but it would be unfeasible to know when to blur a VAT number, but not a phone number.
I’m unsure about the VAT no as well, but I think license plate copies should also be blurred. Can’t find it anymore, but I also blurred a license number that was drawn by hand onto the vehicle once.
On top of that, I also blur mirrored license plates, for example here:
And names of drivers, like truck drivers often do in the windshield, for example here:
Don’t know if the latter is wanted or not, but I feel like this is privacy-relared as well and also isn’t needed for working with the images, so I’ve decided to blur them aswell.
I mainly only worry about blurring the license plate on private vehicles, not commercial ones.
I just blur a lot. One reason is that I live in Germany, and Germans seem very much more concerned about privacy. At least it feels like that. Heck, even Google street view isn’t available in like 90% of the country because of privacy concerns that came up when GSV was in the press a lot. And I don’t want something similar to happen to Mapillary once it may get bigger and better known here. So I try to blur as much as possible.
I too blur all license plates, also reflections and the like. Even that Germany and Denmark is right next to eachother, danes hates privacy. But I still do it because I think it is right.
At Platerrecognizer you can blur licence plate whether it is on the license plate or it is painted on the body of the vehicle. check Plate recognizer to see what i mean
