14 DAY TRIAL // Google Street View continues to be a controversial product and, despite its obvious benefits, many countries are worried about the privacy implications. Google has come under fire time and time again and has had to adjust its approach in many of the countries where it has launched Street View. But it may be facing its greatest challenge yet, EU's data privacy watchdog, the Article 29 group, has been investigating the privacy implications of Street View and has issued a warning letter to Google urging it to change some of its policies.
Specifically, the problem at heart, how long does Google get to keep un-blurred photos on its servers, is one that is being increasingly put forward, especially after Germany made a big deal about it. It's actually a pretty simple problem. Google takes a huge amount of photos in order to map out entire cities for Street View.
It processes and then publishes those photos, but only after people's faces and car number plates have been blurred out by an automatic algorithm. It usually does a pretty good job at it, but it's by no means perfect, so it occasionally blurs things like car hubcaps and, other times, it misses someone's face. Google has a system for people to report these mistakes so the photos can be taken down.
However, in order to actually improve the whole process, Google keeps the raw photos on its severs, so, when a mistake is signaled, it can compare it to the original pictures and see what went wrong and what it can do to prevent it from happening.
Right now, Google keeps the raw photos for a year, but Article 29, made up of data privacy-protection officials from the 27 EU members, says this is too long and is now asking the company to lower it to six months. In a letter sent to Google, the group says that, “It is disproportionate to retain unblurred copies of the images for one year.”
It doesn't actually make that much sense, if the group has a problem with Google storing the original photos, how does shortening the time it has them make any difference? Anything that can happen in 12 months will happen in six too, so it probably makes no difference. For its part, Google is not budging, at least for now.
“The need to retain the unblurred images is legitimate and justified -- to ensure the quality and accuracy of our maps, to improve our ability to rectify mistakes in blurring, as well as to use the data we have collected to build better maps products for our users,” Peter Fleischer, a Google lawyer in charge of privacy issues, said. “We have publicly committed to a retention period of 12 months from the date on which images are published on Street View, and this is the period which we will continue to meet globally.”
Google's troubles in Europe are only just beginning, it seems, the European Commission is investigating complaints from several parties concerning anti-competition issues. Very recently, three of its executives were convicted in Italy for privacy-violation charges. [via Bloomberg]