14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced that it plans to go ahead and launch the Street View service in Germany later in the year. The service has been the center of several disputes with authorities and is now the subject of privacy violation investigations in several countries, over Wi-Fi snooping.
Google and German regulators have rarely seen eye-to-eye. The country’s data protection officials have been one of Google’s biggest critics and Street View has been the center of most of the complaints.
“Google will roll out Street View for the 20 biggest German cities by the end of the year,” the company said in a statement. Google has been collecting imagery in the country since last year.
However, in order to placate concerns from officials, Google will allow Germans to remove their homes from Street View. During a four-week period, users will be able to go to a dedicated Google page and request that their homes be blurred before the images go live on Google Maps.
Officials have commented that the procedure is too complicated and that the period in which people will be able to request the removals coincides with the August holiday when most will be away from their computers.
Google already blurs people’s faces as well as car number plates to protect the privacy of those captured in the images taken by Street View cars. The automated technology is not perfect, but generally does a good job. Still, errors, especially false positives, are not uncommon.
This technology was at the heart of one dispute between Google and German authorities. In order to improve the algorithm, Google stores the unprocessed and un-blurred images on its servers for a year, a period which was deemed much to long by regulators. The two sides came to an agreement.
Recently, inquiries from German officials lead to Google revealing that it had, inadvertently, been collecting personal data from open Wi-Fi networks. The matter is still under investigation in Germany.