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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.'"
...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.
That's not entirely accurate; The guide linked from http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php gives a very good overview of what you can and can not do with a photograph.
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."
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.
If they do, then you are allowed to request copies of the photographs and any other information they have on you. They are allowed to charge a maximum of £10 per request for access to this information.
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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?
As far as I know, its legal in Denmark too. If you're on a public area, and you get photographed, say tourists posing in a photo and you happen to be in the background, and this photo is published on the Web, you cant demand it to be taken down.
Next thing you know, they'd have to blur all the audiences at sports events, because *gasp* they might be televised ?
However, that is not to say i approve of what Google is doing, i think the basic idea is good, I think some effort to at least blur out car registration plates and faces should be done. When they do it on such a large scale, and especially the whole thing about unmarked vans doing it makes it feel kinda creepy. If it said GOOGLE STREET VIEW PICTURE CAM-VAN and wasn't secretive about doing it, it would upset me that much.
Ok...when I read the headline, first thing I thought of..."They have 1000's of CCTV cameras over there, watching their every move, and they're getting riled up about Google taking their picture too?"
Ok, so now that I read your reply..I get it. Suvelliance for non-commercial purposes GOOD, if you try to make a buck off it BAD.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
In France, it is illegal. Every person has a right to his or her own image. It is legal to take pictures of people in public places. It is illegal to publish them without written consent. I am not sure how well this law is applied, especially in the press, but this is the theory. And I also think that it is illegal to take pictures of people in a private place, without consent. That would include, say, people in their home that can be seen from the street through a window.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
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.
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
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.
The UK has one of the most virulent and productive paparazzi in existence. They make a fortune off of candid pictures taken without the consent of the subjects. They do this all over Europe. They have been doing this for a number of years.
Quite simply, this article is wrong. It is legal to take pictures of someone in any public place, and it is legal to make money off them. Consent or not. Period.
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.
If it said GOOGLE STREET VIEW PICTURE CAM-VAN and wasn't secretive about doing it, it would upset me that much.
I agree that blurring license plates faces may be a good idea, but I can understand why Google doesn't wander around in a van that advertises "Hey! Do something crazy now and you'll be immortalized on Google!" Secrecy is not always a bad thing. Google just wants pictures of the streets as they are. If they advertise what they are doing the would get all kinds of crazies doing crazy/stupid/dangerous stuff.
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>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?
As I understand it, French law specifically prohibits the publication of any image derived from a photograph taken in a public place without the consent of the person in that image, if the person is the main or only subject in that image.
If I take a photograph of the Eiffel Tower, and you happen to be in the shot along with a few other people, I don't have to get your consent before publishing the photo, even if I gain commercially from doing so, and even if you could be recognized and identified by your face in the photograph.
There are no doubt some guidelines somewhere about the percentage surface area taken up by the person's face, compared to the main subject (the Eiffel tower, in my example), and you could dig up some jurisprudence on the subject.
source: http://www.scaraye.com/article.php?rub=27&sr=36&a= 270
Since this is so important, I'll summarize from the text.
Bernard Tapie had been held in a prison called "la Santé" and was being released. A weekly magazine "France Dimanche" published on its cover a photo of Tapie's release. The photo showed a police officer getting into a car to the right of Tapie and his family.
The court decided that
there was no grounds to penalise the magazine or to compensate the office.
Contrast this with article 226-1 of the French Penal Code, which concerns publication of photographs taken in a private place.
source: http://www.cru.fr/droit-deonto/droit/protection-dr oits/personnalite.htm
Yet another commentary on this article gives the contrasting situation of a person in a public place:
and goes on to:
OK, I'm going to bite on this because it is really getting out of hand...
;-)
The UK doesn't have that many more CCTV cameras than most other "developed" countries. I've just had two weeks in the Baltimore / D.C. area and I lost count of the number of CCTV cameras I saw, both in public places and on private property.
The huge figures quoted in the UK, as far as I know (and I don't have any sources to quote here, so please prove me wrong) include every kind of CCTV cameras, from those installed within banks and corner stores, to those installed in many ATM machines and traffic monitoring cameras on motorways. If you take that into account, I'm sure other countries fall closely in line too.
Or maybe I've been sucked in too
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?)
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That was my first thought. The point of Street View isn't to take pictures of people anyway, they just happen to be in the way.
That's an interesting idea. If they're just in the way, then all Google has to do is run enough passes up and down the street. A computer could then compare the images and only use parts of the image that remain static from pass to pass. If they can't seem to find a static image for a given location (like a water fountain, animatronic sign, etc.) then you flag that for identification by a human, or you just blur that part out. You'd obviously be able to tell where the image had been spliced together (due to different lighting, etc.) but it could work. Goodness knows google has the computing power to do it.
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