Privacy watchdogs demand Google Street View changes
Privacy officials from across Europe have urged Google to make several changes to the way it operated its Street View service on the continent. They want stronger efforts to avoid breaching confidentiality and a shorter storage period for images.
Street View is part of the firm’s mapping service and involves photographs taken from a vertical position from a car rather than aerial shots. Google has now received a letter from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which brings together data regulators from all European Union member countries.
The letter asks that Google appoint a local representative in each country to make sure it complies with local laws. It also says the firm should apply a more rigorous process to make sure identifying information such as faces and license plate numbers are blurred before publication. And it wants to halve the time Google stores the unedited original images to six months.
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February 26th, 2010
Tell Europe to go to hell.
Retarded people.
February 26th, 2010
Store original images for only six months?
That means that the Google camera cars will need to be on a constant drive aorund to update imagery. Hence your perceived threat to privacy will be even more than it is now, simply because the imagery will be much more recent and accurate.
In actual fact, if a Google camera can see a locality, so can anybody else who may be there. I cannot possibly see how this is an invasion of privacy at all.
For God’s sake Europe, do you actually want this FREE convenience or not?