England's Privacy International doesn't trust in Google's ability to automatically blur faces. While in the US, photographing people in the street is absolutely legal without the need to ask for consent, in the UK, anyone who appears in a photo that is used commercially has to grant consent. Google is rumored to have started taking pictures in the UK this week.

However, Google's experiment with its face blurring technology in New York shows that they are quite capable of employing this technology. Google already blurs all license plate numbers in Street View as well.

This is, of course, a week where Google's privacy policies have been in the news almost every single day (and where Google finally put its privacy policy on its front page). After losing the private data of quite a few of its employees and being forced to release the records of its YouTube users to Viacom, Google was probably hoping to make the news today by having a little Uncle Sam in Street View to celebrate the 4th of July and by releasing Street View for the route of the Tour de France (after all, this is the first European appearance of Street View).