ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 1 -- United States Patent no. 11,972,014, issued on April 30, was assigned to Snap Inc. (Santa Monica, Calif.).
"Apparatus and method for automated privacy protection in distributed images" was invented by Robert Murphy (Venice, Calif.) and Evan Spiegel (Los Angeles).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method executed by a computer includes receiving an image from a client device. A facial recognition technique is executed against an individual face within the image to obtain a recognized face. Privacy rules are applied to the image, where the privacy rules are associated with privacy settings for a user associated with the recognized face. A privacy protected version of the ...