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Greece Halts Google's Street View
Hugh Pickens writes "Greece's Data Protection Authority, which has broad powers of enforcement for Greece's strict privacy laws, has banned Google from gathering detailed, street-level images in Greece for a planned expansion of its Street View mapping service, until the company provides clarification on how it will store and process the original images and safeguard them from privacy abuses. The decision comes despite Google's assurances that it would blur faces and vehicle license plates when displaying the images online and that it would promptly respond to removal requests. In most cases, particularly in the US, Google has been able to proceed on grounds that the images it takes are no different from what someone walking down a public street can see and snap. And last month, Britain's privacy watchdog dismissed concerns that Street View was too invasive, saying it was satisfied with such safeguards as obscuring individuals' faces and car license plates. The World Privacy Forum, a US-based nonprofit research and advisory group, said the Greek decision could raise the standard for other countries and help challenge that argument. 'It only takes one country to express a dissenting opinion,' says Pam Dixon, the group's executive director. 'If Greece gets better privacy than the rest of the world then we can demand it for ourselves. That's why it's very important.'"
I to love how people have no problem with police videotaping you/preventing you from videotaping with an excuse of terrorism just to cover their asses while everyone panics over a google streetview of a public area.
That's not breaking news. The Greeks have history on locking people up for innocently taking photos in public.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
If you think this is a "big mast"...
Any average tall adult could take pictures that high...
I really am bemused by the extreme ranges of responses to this story. It seems that there is only either end of the spectrum - "Yay, for Greek Government for protecting our privacy" to "I trust Google more than I trust any government" - and almost no middle ground. Have we really become that fractured and that single-minded about things?
Neil
That's a really sad statement on the state of society. Whatever happened to quiet, friendly communities where you can throw your windows open to let in the fresh air and chat with passersby?
People started walking around naked in their living rooms! It used to be practically a sin to go to bed naked. Now people want extra privacy! I mean, I like doing this myself, but if my hairy ass ends up on the goog as a result, I have only myself to blame.
A lot of people have also decided that they want more than the baseline of privacy. For instance, it was once considered polite to invite people into your front room to talk; it was decorated and organized to receive strangers. These days there's ample reason NOT to let anyone into your house... The interior of the house has become a more private space. But then people don't want people to look into their private space, and that is just stupid.
Google isn't looking at anything you can't see from a legally-sized vehicle on a public road. If you have something private that can be seen from that vantage, you're not very smart.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
so I hope society can reach a compromise that allows these images to be available without unduly infringing on anyone's privacy.
There already IS a compromise like that, it's called what google is already doing. Google is NOT infringing on anyone's privacy because by definition anything that they are photographing is visible from a public thoroughfare. They are trampling some people's mistaken assumptions about privacy, though. Here's a hint: if you want something to be private, you don't do it in public.
The amount of data should not even be considered as a factor; if one person did what google is doing in every state of a nation, would that be too much data in one place? What if it was one person per city? Now, imagine that those people link their map sites together seamlessly. What's the difference between that and what we have now? That google did it for us?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Years ago I built a panoramic, stereographic photography system (spaceshot) and also did a great deal of work with rendering and measuring spaces using stereo images. This leads me to the following theory, which, if Google are NOT doing what I describe here would be pretty damn surprising. J from: http://jerrykew.blogspot.com/ If you have a perfect spherical photo of a city, taken at equidistant intervals, then you have the necessary information (think stereo images) to reverse engineer the 3D form of the city. Google will build a virtual version of every city, and we will click on objects in that 'space' to go to sites. PPC ads will follow in the space, and thus their investment in Google Maps, Earth, Sketchup and Streetview will deliver their returns. I am sure they will be playing with it now in their labs.
DPA said it wanted clarification from the U.S. Internet company on how it will store and process the original images and safeguard them from privacy abuses
despite
Google's assurances that it would blur faces and vehicle license plates when displaying the images online.
The question is then, does Google store the images with faces and license plates blurred, or that's just post-processing for online display?
Google's statement definitely tends to point at the latter. And I could see a few problems there.
This is ridiculous. It's one snapshot taken at a more or less random time. How is this an invasion of privacy when the picture is taken in a public place? Total idiocy.