14 DAY TRIAL // Google is playing hardball in Europe over the latest Street View dispute and is now saying it's considering dropping the producing in the old continent if EU's latest plans to require Google to remove all raw, unblurred images it holds every six months as opposed to a year like it does now. More specifically, Google says that it may not make another round of shooting around all the European cities as it could become prohibitively expensive.
“I think we would consider whether we want to drive through Europe again, because it would make the expense so draining,” Michael Jones, Google’s chief technology advocate and creator of Google Earth, told Bloomberg at the CeBIT Technology conference in Hanover.
The issue at stake is for how long Google should be allowed to keep unprocessed images on its servers. At the moment, all the photos the Street View cars and trikes take are stored in their original form for a year. This is done to improve the face and number plate detection technology it employs to blur any part of a photo that might be invading someone's privacy. It has to keep the original photos so it can compare it with the processed ones and see what went wrong when an error is signaled in one of the images that ends up on the public site.
European officials, however, are not very thrilled about the prospect and have, repeatedly, asked Google to shorten the time it keeps the photos as well as make several other concessions. For the most part Google has complied with the local data privacy officials, but it now believes that the latest requests are exaggerated and is refusing to compromise.
“I think that privacy is more important than technology but for privacy people it is only about privacy but for us it is also about technology,” Jones also said. “We have to be actually able to do what they want us to do. What we want is to have enough time.”