14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month we were reporting that the French version of Google's Street View had to deal with some privacy related issued before it could be released. While people were more than happy about being able to scour all parts of the world at street level, they were not happy about having their picture seen by millions and millions of viewers. Google is now planning to launch Street View in the UK and is facing much scrutiny from British privacy watchdogs.
Martin Warner, co-founder of Technology of Tomorrow 08 had this to comment: "Google's new Street View service due to hit the UK soon is good for consumers and provides value, but the company is likely to be in breach of privacy laws. There are ways round this for Google, but it could prove very costly to doctor images to remove people from Street View, which could threaten the product."
Google of course doesn't want to break any laws, nor does it want to face a class action lawsuit from the people accidentally caught on camera by the Street View team. Surely it will wait until Street View complies with the current UK legislation and it will most likely adopt the same face blurring techniques used on the French version of Street view.
"We will use technology, like face-blurring, and operational controls, such as image removal tools, so that Street View remains useful and in keeping with local norms wherever it is available. We think this type of privacy-enabling technology is the best way of meeting the challenge of continuing to respect people's expectation of privacy, while not stifling the development of new products and services that everyone can enjoy and benefit from," said a Google spokesperson.
However, the thing is that the face-blurring technique is not all that accurate and there are mishaps; in France for example the program proved that it can not blur all the faces and all the license plates when they were shot from a certain angle. This is perhaps the main reason why Privacy International has inquired about how the technology works.