Google has to make several other adjustments, but nothing it can't handle

Jun 11, 2012 14:31 GMT  ·  By

Google has gotten approval to run Street View in Switzerland, one of the strictest countries in the world when it comes to privacy. The service's future in the country was questioned as the local regulator asked Google to ensure 100 percent accuracy of the face and number-plate blurring technology.

No technology is perfect and Google could in no way guarantee 100 percent accuracy so it would have been forced to leave the country.

A local court decided that Google did not need to offer 100 percent accuracy, but still imposed some limitations on the service.

The big win for Google is that it only has to guarantee 99 percent accuracy. It may not seem like it, but the difference between 99 percent and 100 percent is huge. Google's technology already works properly in more than 99 percent of cases, so it already complies with the court's decision.

However, the court also asked Google to shoot all imagery at a maximum height of 2m, to prevent the cameras from peeking over fences and into people's homes and gardens. A similar restriction was imposed in Japan for the same reasons.

What's more, Google has to completely blur or remove sensitive locations and buildings like hospitals or women's shelters. Google must also obscure clothing and skin color at these locations. The company must also make it easy for users to ask for images to be deleted.

Google already conforms to most of these requirements in other places, Germany for example, and features such as the ability to report an image have been built into the service from the get go.

Google has one of its largest offices outside of the US in Zurich, the largest engineering one at least. Ironically, many of those Google employees work on Google Maps and related technologies.