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Google Street View Could Be Unlawful In Europe
arallsopp writes "European data protection laws restrict the commercial use of photographs where individuals are identifiable. The law sets extra requirements for so-called sensitive personal data: it demands explicit consent, not just notification: 'If Google's multi-lens camera cars come to Europe and inadvertently find themselves taking pictures of persons leaving a church or sexual health clinic, they may just need to pull over and start picking up signatures.'"
...but probably not in England.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
...is that they will start taking multiple sets of photographs in the same locations on each street, and then splicing or otherwise removing the people present in the photos.
This was never meant to be an exercise in snooping on people, though it has turned into an artistic representation of real life.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Google doesn't need consent from anyone. All they need to do is blur out the images of any people in a street scene, just like the TV networks do.
Why is everyone making such a fuss over this when the solution is well known and trivial to implement?
with blur. It's that simple. They don't need an advanced algorithm to identify individual people, only one to identify that there is a person there and then apply a blur on that region of the photo. I think Google can handle it.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
In godless, sexually liberated Europe, I don't see that happening anyway.
Have you seen the google van? A quick stop in Italy to make some modifications to the van, and you'll get that explicit consent, right boss?
Hey Tony, get out of the van, this guy doesn't wanna sign the consent...
What was he doing in front of cameras while trying to commit suicide?
He sued because he wanted to sell the footage to Rupert Murdoch.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
They're walking down the street. Everyone can see them.
They're already on 15 cameras a day according to recent numbers, and everyone has a cell camera.
This is like the HIPAA laws in this country.
Besides my reflux, I now have writer's cramp from filling out the HIPAA forms acknowleding that they told me they won't tell anyone what I have.
As my doctor said, what is he going to do, run out into the parking lot and start yelling "You won't believe what JP has!"
Plus, when you sit in the waiting room and anyone over 55 starts a conversation, it's all about what's wrong with them, and turns into a mass symptom and storytelling party.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I think it was Kaiser Wilhelm II who first forced this kind of law at the beginning of the previous century. Apparently he had had a bad hair day photo taken and created a law...
It would have been nice to be an Emperor, occassionally! I have had many a bad hair day.
...playing with my google.
You appearance on the street does not constitute "sensitive personal data" no matter where you are and what you are being photographed in front of. This is an overly alarmist article more suited for the frothing-at-the-mouth types over at Digg than here at Slashdot.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It doesn't seem like that much of a technological feat to just put a black bar over the eyes. Heck, google could probabaly automate this process "if two eyes, put a black bar over them"..
Done and done, have at the sexual health clinic
"Clap clap clap"
All this means is that faces will be blurred. This will be WAY more cost / time efficient than actually getting signatures, or trying to only get shots with no people.
In fact, they are probably working on some sort of automated way to do this right now.
-- lol pwned
I've seen the plentiful comments about simply blurring the faces, but a quick look at the San Fran streets shows me they're not bluring the license plates. I've got a crystal clear pic of one up right now. I can even clearly see that the vehicle was purchased at 'SERRAMONTE FORD', whatever that is. It also has some kind of a work-rig on top. I wonder if those are commercial plates? A quick DMV lookup should tell me, one sec... I can't quite make out the letters on the tags, but I bet Cali uses a color-code system. They're - well you get the point.
If they won't/can't do that, why then would they do faces?
Some countries in Europe may have laws against photographing people, I don't know. But here we are talking about laws against publishing said photographs without express permission from the people being photographed. Many countries have such laws and the exception is typically if the person being photographed can be said to be a "public figure", in which case you are free to publicise pictures of them without permission, except if the pictures where obtained in a way that would be consider a violation of privacy (climbing over their garden fence to spy at them in their swimming pool).
The main reason for this kind of laws is that two parties freedom are directly at odds. The freedom of the photographer and publisher has to be weighed up against the freedom and privacy of the individual.
The laws surrounding surveillance cameras are in other words completely irrelevant in this discussion as we are talking about the right to publish rather than the right to monitor. The police state discussion is a different discussion altogether.
(I'm french)
In France, there is a directory (pagesjaunes) that provides, with their addresses, pictures of many of the building in Paris. But you never see a recognizeable person on them (most of the time there is noone on them).
There is no excuse to this kind of problems: simply blur people after pictures are taken. And people should never have to ask. Everybody deserves his privacy.
like what they did for 28 days later?
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
sexual health clinic ?!?
/.-ers.
Can somebody explain me what the author is referring to? Looks more like an hidden add for
If some people don't care whether they are photographed in public, but others do, then regardless of the law you should act considerately and ask permission before photographing someone, rather than assuming they feel the same way you do. People have no choice but to appear in public occasionally; it shouldn't be used as justification for photographing them, and the law in Europe recognizes this.
No, but publication of your image without consent is, for example, forbidden in France. It is not a matter of what is sensitive or not, it is a matter of respect of the person, that has a right to choose whether they want to be seen by possible millions on a google picture or not.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
It would seem that a warning vehicle could drive in front of the google car to warn people. However, I feel that the end result would be idiots rushing out into the street with dumb signs and the street view tool would become rather useless. Perhaps Google should just invest into technology to automatically erase people from photos.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
A chicken crossing the road could be unlawful in Europe...
Oh, please!
- Izhido
In Europe is it, and is covered by the data protection laws. Just ask the gutter press how many times they've been bitch-slapped in court for snapping royals, celeb's and politicians in less than desirable situations.
Yes, well, see, that's just what makes it a privacy issue. Being such a godless bunch, we wouldn't want to be caught on photo coming out of a church, would we? What would our godless friends think about that? Beats having to find some quick explanation like, "I... uhh... thought it was a kinky S&M club. You know, what with the naked guy on the cross, and all." ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is not really a problem.
r ize.php
;)
Of course Google will have to implement some algorithm to avoid publishing recognizable pictures of someone. But a lot of technologies are already available to solve this problem. One of the most impressive I have seen is inpainting: once you have selected the area you wish to remove from the picture it rebuilds the missing part... There is a Gimp plugin that perform this kind of operation: http://www.manucornet.net/Informatique/Gimp_Textu
Ah yes I almost forgot... it turns out that the author is now working at Google.
I am pretty sure that with all those people working there they can do something about it
Then anything that moves will be blurred, including people. Sorted!
Reduce, reuse, cycle
So if I'm in Paris and take a picture of Notre Dame that just happens to catch some well-known atheist leaving, and (unknowingly) post it to a blog, I'm is serious legal trouble? How absurd. I always thought Europe had way too many laws. This only confirms that impression.
What Google is doing has a lot of people (particularly women) understandably upset, but from what I've hear it's no more illegal here than all the satellite photos they've been posting for several years. If our laws made what Google's doing illegal, they'd also be making most outdoor photography illegal. (How do you take a picture outside without including some stranger in it?) Europeans, particularly those in Belgium and Northern Germany, may like a "What is not mandatory is illegal" mindset--the infamous attitude of the Prussians--but I'm not sure most people in the US will.
I'm surprised google hasn't endeavored to capture multiple shots of locations at different times and aggregated that data to create unobstructed views along each street.
Why allow people, cars and trucks to obstruct signage? If they don't help identify the location or give you a feel for the "street view", remove them.
There's that tourist remover project that seems relevant.
Privacy shouldn't even be an issue because the people simply don't need to be in the photos.
The government can put cameras on every block, but anyone who takes pictures of the streets themselves for public use is illegal.
I know it's daily government behavior, and there's probably lots more examples of it... but, it's still funny.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
what if it isn't identifiable, say that the is a giant smiley face emoticon where the person's head is (or some other methond of censoring their face)?
When we are told one should have no expectation of privacy in the outdoors what's really being said is one should have an expectation of being under surveillance at all times while outdoors. When Mr. Spock scanned the planet, we were being psychologically prepared for a predetermined future. And so between engineering the future vs. citizens voting for their representatives and deciding a future with engineering as part of the equation, the latter has become an utter joke.
Citizens cannot use google maps, however the government can put a video cammera on every street corner and on security helocopters flying around the major cities?
In France, I have heard of several cases of people who had ads banned because their house could be recognized on the photo, so advertizers now make sure to have the consent of the owners or simply photoshop fake houses over photos of empy land when they need individual homes in their ads. I don't know if it would impact massive collection.
Otherwise I wouldn't see this.
This whole thing has been done over and over again in my very European country. Reference.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Good thing it's in the U.S. then!
Really?Are you talking about a fictional country called Europe here, or the moon orbiting Jupiter?
>People have no choice but to appear in public occasionally; it shouldn't be used as justification for photographing them, and the law in Europe recognizes this.
Yea man, what do you want us to do? wear a "robots.txt" around our necks?
and I'm out with my girlfriend walking somewhere, I swear to god I'm gonna lift her shirt up for the camera.
It's not just about law, it's about respecting certain unwritten cultural rules. When I travelled to Cuba, I found people find it rude if you take pictures of them without asking.
Here in Amsterdam there is an unwritten law that forbids you to take pictures in the Red Light District. If you take a photograph of a prostitute you can be sure that someone will take your camera and break it. And the police won't be to eager to help you, as it is considered to be very disrespectfull to the woman working there.
I would be very surprised if the Red Light District shows up on Google Street View.
I mind having to fill out a form from scratch - every time I visit the office - acknowledging that they told me they'll obey the law.
I was also pointing out how ironical it might be to apparently also swear the front end to secrecy when we know how people blab their maladies anyway.
My work here is done. The next 30 messages will dispute the usage of "ironical".
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The Google van is a vehicle and often takes pictures while moving. Slow shutter is not an option.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I walk to and from work every day through Vancouver's #1 tourist stop, that being Gastown. I must be in hundreds if not thousands of tourist photos by now, just from making that commute daily during the last two years. Imagine a future (it's not that hard given stories like TFA) where tourists are banned from taking photos on their trip because some local, or other tourist, doesn't want to be in other people's pictures.
Developments like this make me worry about the future. It won't be long now before, in the supposed interest of giving every individual complete privacy and control over use of their likeness or that of any of their owned property, we instead restrict everyone to doing nothing but getting up in the morning, going to work, and going home again. On the weekend we'll be allowed to get up, go shopping, and go home again. That's it. Produce. Consume. Leave all the freedom (and money-making, of course) to the corporations and governments (controlled by corporations.)
It's a scary thought, and a slippery slope. For those who look at the slope, notice that it has a fairly mild grade, and think it not that scary, have this food for thought: What does it matter if a slippery slope has a mild grade if its surface has a coefficient of friction approaching zero? Think about it.
You know, there's something called persons of public interest, and the law is different regarding those...
Huh... Tell that to the paparazzi, and to the magazines which buy their photos. I'm sure they haven't encountered such a well thought out argument, and will gladly capitulate once they see the light.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Instead of inventing algorithms to detect people and cars etc, the simplest method would be (given that they are standing still to take the picture) having a longer exposure time (2-10 seconds would be ok). That way things moving get blurred automatically, stationary things would be considered part of the street.
Another way of doing it is taking multiple identical pictures at different times and then sampling the people and other things that have moved, out of the picture by combining all the pictures and taking the highest common denominators with a simple algorithm.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Back in the 1980's there was a Saturday Night Live skit about a new kind of camera film called "Bothachrome" (named after South African apartheid prime minister P.W. Botha) that automatically erased all black people from the photos, leaving the white people there. They even copped the Paul Simon tune "Kodachrome" with altered lyrics as the theme for the parody-skit-commercial. I tried to find a link, but there don't to be any on the web. The skit was un-politically-correct as hell, which really drove the point home about the worldwide disgust against Botha's apartheid regime in that era.
Unless I am mistaken, in Quebec it is against the law to photograph anyone on the street without their consent. So in this sense, yes it does obviously constitute "sensitive personal data", at least enough so to be regulated by the government. And that would mean that Google doing this in Quebec would be illegal, unless they stopped everyone they photographed and got their signature. Whatever your opinion on the matter may be. .o.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Like This guy, watering the plants.
;^D
D'oh! Google removed it!
Actually, it would be better if Google could remove all moving objects from their images. Often, StreetView images of storefronts are blocked by traffic. I've seen a section where most of a block consists of a side view of a UPS van.
This is quite feasible. I went to a talk by some of the CGI guys who did "Tokyo Drift", and they described how they got good background pictures of a major intersection in downtown Tokyo. They sent someone there with instructions to take a large number of pictures of the intersection from many different viewpoints, and stitched those together into panoramas. Multiple panoramas were merged, aligned, and empty street combined until an empty panorama of the intersection was obtained and mapped onto a 3D model. The actual driving action was then filmed in a parking lot in Pasadena, and CG pedestrians were inserted.
Google can do this more automatically, because they have depth data. Their van is carrying a line-scanning LIDAR, scanning vertically.
They're clearly still debugging the process. The West Coast van has more resolution than the East Coast van. But they're having trouble with picture alignment. They need to get a fibre optic heading gyro. That's probably what's causing the seam errors that show up frequently in Google StreetView.
That was our big omission with our DARPA Grand Challenge entry - the +=2 degrees of error from the inertial/magnetic compass unit was enough to throw off the LIDAR map building, and the thing had to keep stopping and rescanning. We should have spent the $20K for a FOG gyro, like the more successful teams. There's progress; those things are only $6K now, as opposed to $20K three years ago. A GPS/INS/odometry system that can give location to within a few centimeters and heading to within 15 minutes of arc, even in urban environments, was $140K four years ago and needed 4U of air-conditioned rack space. Now it's under $20K and dropping. And other approaches (SLAM) that correct heading info using camera data are starting to work reliably. So Google should actually be able to do this.
Your appearance in a photograph does not require your consent when you are not the SUBJECT being photographed.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=San+Bruno, +California,+United+States&ie=UTF8&ll=37.625041,-1 22.482667&spn=0.022331,0.038109&z=15&om=1&layer=c& cbll=37.617952,-122.485275&cbp=1,228.978817071945, 0.56251897101312,3
They are taking pictures at different times, i can see three seperate times of day in this one spot.
I'm not afraid of robots. It's those damn, dirty apes that concern me.
Use a common photographic technic and algorithm... Take 3 or more photos of the same scene approximately 5 seconds apart from the same position.
Everything that stays put is there, everything that moves away is not there.
Better yet, just scan each city twice (Yes, doubles the workload, and the processing time to filter things out).. Go through the first time, take two photos 5 seconds apart. Go through a second time, take two more photos 5 seconds apart. Compare! If there are "questionable zones" that appeared in two out of four, you subject it to manual viewing in their image-game system. Basically a "Clear or Not Clear" selection.
*sigh* not like anyone will read this...
In the Netherlands, a company called Cyclomedia has already taken photo's out in the street. A very very popular Dutch housing site, Funda has used the images to givaq a 3-d view of the area around the house that is for sale. They have been doing this for quite some time now, and there was actually zero uproar about it. And then comes Google and the media wake up...
So they're already having to do some significant processing on the source data. If they drive by 2-3 times they can combine the runs to produce a final image that only has things that don't move in it.
So Canada has stupid laws too? I was getting worried that Canada might be awesome after seeing all the "Candian Girls Rock" shirts.
What if the SUBJECT is "human lifestyle"? This would never work in the U.S. :)
You appearance on the street does not constitute "sensitive personal data"
In Canada it is more a case of making publicly available the pictures. We call it "expectation of privacy while in public". Anyone can take any picture they want. You just cannot publish it.
A landmark case of a girl sitting on the sidewalk made it clear. She was minding her own business, reading a book under the sun on the sidewalk. A few weeks later she saw her picture in a magazine. Only she was in the picture with the stairs. No special subject place or event.
Exceptions are made for "public interests", like a politician or movie star. It's part of their career choice. Protesters on the street or presence at a "public event" like a race or concert in public. If it might make the news, don't except privacy.
Funny enough, once that girl decided to go to court, the picture became newsworthy, and was published over and over again.
Yes cameras are everywhere, but we should expect to have our life kept private, not be plastered everywhere just to satisfy some "artsy" urge of some photo-maniac project.
The alternative is to make it legal to year a mask at all time (Burka debate anyone?)
Under Newtonian mechanics, if we assume the frame of reference of the Google Spy Van, then it follows that everything in the scene is moving.
Are you adequate?
How come this is okay in the litigation-happy United States but not okay in anything-goes Europe?
Doesn't google know how to do a time lapse digital photography?
If you set your shutter speed to 30 minutes its pretty rare to get any people in the image - or cars for that matter unless they are parked.
How else do you think you get pictures of busy public buildings but without any people on them (well before the days of photoshop)
Ok so time lapse is very old school and would probably take too long to get all the photos they want - but wouldn't some hybrid of time lapse and digital processing work quite well? (eg 10 stills over 60 seconds and an algorithm to create a composite using only the static parts?)
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
I'm sorry, you must be looking for Digg. Its just next door. .o.
Google needs to implement a face recognition algorithm and blur them out so as to make them unrecognizable.
Have gnu, will travel.
I propose we all wear T-shirts with the appropriate licensing and permissions for use of our images. Creative commons, non-commercial use only, fee required, no use ... Right up front, no misunderstandings or ambiguity.
If this law is real and was actually strictly followed, lots of photographers would be out of business. Art photographers often take pictures with recognizable people of them, and publicly display them with the intent of selling them. Publishers of travel books, guides, brochures also publish pictures with recognizable people in them. News photographers do as well. All commercial, all with recognizable people. What's Google doing differently?
Did you mean: Microsoft is Big Brother. They should change the motto to "Do only evil."
If I visited a certain "bad repute" place often, I would not like my pics to be on Google, with a fair probability (in fact with any probability). Of course, it may happen occasionally (like a tourist can photograph you by accident, and post the pic on his/her blog) and these would very likely never be followed. The law is a blunt instrument, but the visibility of Google search and the sheer extent to which Google wants to (and can) do this adds an entirely different dimension, which should be taken into account in the law. Furthermore, who will guarantee me Gooogle will not try to apply some of their image search & match algorithms to these pictures in the future? I hardly trust the goverment to put so may cameras to "sensitive areas", but at leat I know these are never published or improperly searched. Do we really want to let a private company own all this picture info about our everyday movements?
Just recognizing and blurring faces won't be enough. Many people are in these photos quite close up and presumable their friends and relatives would still be able to recognize them even if their face is blurred. Just think of the infamous girl with her thong showing getting something out of her car, for instance, I'm sure she's easily recognizable to her friends and family, from her body shape, clothes, her car, etc., and her face isn't even showing to begin with.
Couldn't they simply have a bunch of interns who look at every photo, and blur the faces/bodies of people that appear? How hard could that be?
Why is a pixel patchwork (GEarth) not the solution?
Varying deserted street time state/condition stitched together
The occasional movie star stepping onto the street with an umbrella
Hailing the occasional dry driverless taxi.
sometimes, nothing.
So Google will photograph all the byways of Europe, including its bystanders. Then it will be forced to develop technology that ID's the bystanders, and propositions them with permission forms when they're most likely to sign.
Like getting an email while googling porn.
People in public should expect to be recorded. Governments should be prohibited from linking among private data, must expire data after/outside necessary/authorized transactions, and other restrictions respecting large orgs with too much power and info that threatens the broadest boundary between privacy and publicity. But relying on tech incompetence to protect false privacy in public is game over.
When we've got that line drawn properly, we'll start to defend our privacy inside the boundary much more aggressively.
--
make install -not war
I like your solution. It's too bad the people that took these pictures didn't think like you. I mean, losing half of the last century's photographic history is nothing compared to all the souls that wouldn't have been stolen by the camera.
I would take it one step further & propose that since I have no choice but to appear in public occasionally, that no one look at me or at least not retain any memory of it until they ask permission. I for one, look forward to our camera-shy overlords.
Which fetish are you defending?
Freak.
If what Google is doing is Evil. Then what about all of the live webcams?
Luckily for Google, the French invented the Daguerreotype (now patent free!). This is a great technological solution for the problem of people appearing photographs of buildings.
That's unworkable. If you're out in public I'd argue you're fair game. Otherwise you may as well ban all photography in public places. Laws that give the subject control of the photos unless they sign those rights away appear to make sense until you realize that this makes amateur photography and journalism rather impractical (necessitating special laws at least for journalism and gathering evidence in civil or criminal complaints). Its much easier if people simply accept what you do in public may be recorded, and not just by city officials and security cameras.
Classic example is a topless woman on a beach who then claims to feel "violated" and "disgusted" because she was photographed "half naked". Yet the hypocrite is perfectly willing to appear in public half naked in the first place.
By the way I'm an amateur photographer but I don't do nudes/porn and haven't ever had any kind of complaint against me (baring one paranoid old man on a train who once threatened to smash my camera when I wasn't taking photos at all, just reviewing ones I'd already taken and messing with camera settings). Even if I wanted to do nudes (and I don't as photographing people in general is such a hassle compared to wildlife and landscapes) it just isn't worth the trouble in oh so many ways.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Put enough people with Photoshop at it ! I know people in Viet Nam who do exactly this job for a living, so it's obviously affordable for someone.
In the US Photographers need people they photograph to sign model release forms in order to not be sued for Privacy violations... especially if the pics are making Google money... which they all would be doing via google ads and whatnot... If the pics are of identifiable people, or even if they are of identifiable things like sculptures, etc. that are not in public domain lawsuits could ensue due to copyright violations of blueprints, etc. Tons of companies could sue as well if a car make or model on a street that ends up in a photo is recognizable. That's why Ford likes to send out cease and desist notices to anyone who uploads photos of their cars on Turbosquid... even if the car is one small part of the picture and the main emphasis is on the the background that has a sunset in it or something.
Despite commercial use or not: there are restrictions on PUBLISHING images. That are:
In a public space or some public event you have to ask permission, if the persons are identifiable and a major part of content. Obviously, unlike rumors of "more than three people" that is no good criteria. Imagine a case with 10 people, but only one has the pants pissed.
Public space is what you see without much technical help, like Telephoto lenses, ladders, trees, the window of your own house etc.pp. You have to shoot from a place everyone could just go and stand and watch.
That is even different in Belgium and France (and more), where not only persons as such are covered, but more of their rights. E.g. you might get in trouble with the architect of the Atomium in Brussels for IP-infringement to the architect.
In Germany that only applies to stuff that is non-permanent (I think 25 years), and used for sculptures, art etc.pp.
Celebrities are part of public life (if in public) and have to stand being published.
And no, there does not seem to be much care about it over here, but if you want to play safe, that is how.
I have no idea why this is modded troll because the parent is exactly correct. Portrait rights typically include an exception for pictures of celebrities where it is okay to photograph them. In several countries it also only applies if the work in question is a portrait (i.e. not just a random street which happened to have some pedestrians), so it's quite possible that there is no problem at all.