Street View privacy guarantees remain fuzzy

Google Street View

The fate of the Swiss version of Google's Street View remains undecided after the country's privacy watchdog met representatives of the tech giant on Monday.

At the end of last week, only days after it was launched, Hanspeter Thür, the data protection commissioner, called for the service to be taken offline immediately.

He cited flaws in Google’s system for blurring faces and license plates, and threatened legal action.

“Numerous reports from the public and our own research show that Google Street View does not respect the conditions that were laid down,” Thür said in a statement issued late on Friday. “Many faces and car numbers have not been blurred, or only insufficiently so.”

Thür wanted the tech giant to “improve the service and ensure that the images published meet Swiss legal requirements”.

Officials from Thür’s office said on Monday after the meeting that some questions still remained open and needed to be clarified. Further information about the results of the discussions will be given later this week.

In a statement, Google Switzerland welcomed further talks “to show our leading role in applications for the protection of the private sphere.”

On Sunday, the high tech company defended Street View and said it takes privacy seriously. The tech giant admits that its anonymisation system is not perfect but says it is responsive to complaints.

“We attach the greatest importance to data protection, and we always respect the laws of the country where we are working,” Google Switzerland spokesman Matthias Meyer told swissinfo.ch earlier. But he admitted that there are still teething problems.

Still working out the details

“Our face and license plate blurring software is very effective, but like any new technology it still makes mistakes now and then – occasionally blurring things that shouldn’t be blurred, or missing some things that should,” he said.

In a statement on Monday, Google told swissinfo.ch that they had received “very few” removal requests. “In most cases images have been removed within hours.”

Thür told the Swiss news agency the same day that Google had received 300 requests from users for images to be blurred or removed – a figure he described as “high”.

Privacy concerns have done nothing to slow traffic on Google’s servers. The company, which has its European headquarters in Zurich, said there had been an 80 per cent increase in traffic on its Google Maps service.

But to improve on the service, Google retains the original, unblurred images of whatever appears on its website.

The company has held discussions with the European Commission’s working party on data protection to fix a timeline for permanently blurring them. In June, it promised not to keep the raw images indefinitely but has not yet suggested a time limit.

CIA data

Sébastien Fanti, a lawyer specialising in internet issues, says the data is wide open to the authorities in the United States. He cites a provision in the USA Patriot Act, which allows any US government agency to comb through data collected anywhere in the world by US firms, even without a court order.

On Wednesday he presented privacy watchdog Thür with a sheaf of complaints he had received about Google Switzerland.

Fanti, who is writing a book on the relationship between the US Central Intelligence Agency and internet companies, points out that after the passing of the Patriot Act following the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, authorities have set up the world’s largest database, compiled from US corporate information.

“If the CIA asks to see what was going on in Zurich this spring, Google isn’t going to provide blurred images,” he warns.

In Europe privacy laws are applied differently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In Germany, authorities have said that people must be informed before their photos are taken, or at least before they go online. No German streets are indexed in Street View. In Greece, Google’s cars are banned.

Meyer does not deny that Google cooperates with authorities. He cites the case of thieves arrested in the Netherlands because they happened to climb out of a window at the very moment a Google car was driving down the street.

But that’s a far cry from the Orwellian “Big Brother”, he says. “What we are putting on line are photos of the past. Once they’ve been taken they don’t change, nothing is shown in real time.”

Marc-André Miserez, swissinfo.ch (Adapted from French by Justin Häne)

Google

California-based Google was co-founded by former Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The company’s search engine, still the heart of its business, first appeared in 1996. The company was incorporated in September 1998.

Google went public in 2004 and was worth $23 billion (SFr26 billion) at the time. In 2007 its market capitalisation was nearing $200 billion.

It has more than 50 offices in 200 countries and employs almost 20,000 full-time staff.

In 2004 Google launched its own free email service called Gmail and bought up a company that had developed the virtual globe programme that became Google Earth two years later.

Google launched Street View in the US in May 2007. The French Tour de France cycle race for Street View was the first release of Street View in Europe.

Since then the service has also become available for Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, Italy and Britain.

The ultimate declared aim of Google is to provide street views of the whole world.

To use Street View you can either type an address or postcode into Google Maps and find a static photo of it, or you can drag an orange icon, called “Pegman” across the map and drop it wherever you like. The street has to be highlighted blue.

An image of the area will appear on the screen and you can then use arrows to rotate it.