BOSTON - After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however.

Although Google's Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing - everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity.

Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View's goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View.

Google spokesman Larry Yu said the company is still tweaking the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things - things a computer erroneously interprets as faces - but that is better than leaving too many faces unblurred, Yu said.

- The Associated Press

Digital images sorted by location? Try Eye-Fi

NEW YORK - A wireless memory card for digital cameras now comes with an added twist: Besides making it easier to store and share photos, the latest version of the Eye-Fi card also helps sort images by location.

Eye-Fi Explore, due out next month, taps into a database run by Skyhook Wireless. That company sends trucks up and down streets to scan for home wireless routers or commercial hotspots and record the unique identifying code and location of each.

The Eye-Fi card can sense the Wi-Fi access point that happens to be nearby, regardless of whether that access point is open or password-protected. The unique code for that access point gets matched with what's in the Skyhook database. When you take a photo, Eye-Fi automatically attaches data about the current location, as determined by Skyhook.

Like GPS-based ''geotagging'' products, Eye-Fi tag photos with latitude and longitude coordinates. That could boost geotagging, which remains limited to more tech-savvy or professional photographers.

Without the aid of Eye-Fi or a GPS device, location information needs to be entered manually.

The $129 Eye-Fi Explore comes with 2 gigabytes of storage and works with any camera using SD memory cards.

- The Associated Press