Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Maybe the Greeks are worried Google's van is a trojan horse.
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Are you slow?
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
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.
...and beautiful women.
That's true, we have a lot of hot tourist girls.
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.