14 DAY TRIAL // Street View has always been one of Google's most controversial products. Though the service is largely understated in the public eye, it manages to grab the attention of those either genuinely interested in the public's privacy or just looking for an easy target to prop up some political agenda.
Google has been asked by a court in Switzerland to make sure that all images that end up on the site have the faces of people and car number plates blurred.
Google currently employs a technology that detects faces and number plates and removes them from the images, but like any automated process, it's not perfect.
The court, however is not content with the 98 percent to 99 percent accuracy Google claims the system has and wants 100 percent even if Google will have to do it manually.
Google has said that it cannot comply with the request and, if left with no other alternative, may have to shut down the service altogether in the country.
In the mean time, it's appealing to the highest court in the country to have the verdict overturned.
The country's privacy watchdog, Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commission, found that the service was not in compliance with local privacy regulations since it didn't blur all of the images.
A court agreed with the assessment in March and Google has taken the fight to the highest court looking to overturn the ruling. If it doesn't manage it though, it will have to back out of the country since guaranteeing 100 percent accuracy is not feasible.
Google has had plenty of trouble with Street View before. In Germany it moved to enable people to request that their houses be removed from the service before it went live. In the end, a couple of hundreds of thousands of homes were blurred, representing a small percentage of the households in Germany.