Chrome will soon automatically blur explicit Google Image search results

Today is “Safer Internet Day”, and Google often celebrates with new updates to the privacy and security tools across its ecosystem. For this year’s festivities, the company announced that it’s going to start automatically blurring images marked or detected as explicit in Google Image search.

In the Keyword blog post covering the feature, a test search for the word “injury” was performed, and instead of automatically showing the image of a dismounted complex blast injury, the image is strongly blurred with a hidden eyeball icon overtop of it. Additionally, “This image may contain explicit content” is written out in that spot as well.

Of course, Chrome’s SafeSearch on Windows and Mac desktops is responsible for this, and your settings can be tweaked if you have a strong stomach and want to do research uncensored. The options presented are fairly straightforward as you can only blur or unblur images.

If you’re a parent, you won’t need to worry about toggling this on for your children – it’s already on by default for users under the age of eighteen. However, if your kids are browsing Chrome on the desktop or laptop using your Google account login, you may want to protect them by switching this on.

I personally would prefer to leave it on at all times and simply click the “View image” button that appears on each hidden photo if I think it will be relevant to my research. Once the update rolls out over the next few months, SafeSearch will automatically turn on image blur for sensitive content for those who didn’t previously have it enabled – you know, to protect people who aren’t aware up front that the feature exists.