Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Swiss Privacy Concerns Over Google Street View

A Swiss privacy protection official (Hanspeter Thür of the EDÖB) asks Google for their Street View service to (my translation, though the auto-translation from French – as opposed to the auto-translation from German – is superb):

• “deliver a better solution to make faces and license plates completely unrecognizable,
• put special focus on anonymizing in areas with sensitive facilities like e.g. hospitals, schools or prisons,
• delete records of private streets if no permission was granted,
• delete records of enclosed locations (court yards, gardens) and in the future, decrease the height of the mounted camera,
• inform the concerned villages one week before photos are being shot, and one week before they photos are being put online, and that Google
• put no new images of Swiss streets live until all legal concerns have been clarified.”

Some of these seem odd to me at first glance (like the one about anonymizing schools and hospitals – Google is shooting publicly visible space there, so at first glance trying to prevent this seems both paranoid as well as futile). Google is given 30 days to clarify whether they want to accept these recommendations. If Google rejects the recommendation, the matter will may be moved up a place in the Swiss federal administrative hierarchy.

[Thanks TomHTML!]

Swiss Privacy Concerns Ov ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6+2)

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