Rosio Pavoris

Google’s Street View could be unlawful in Europe

EDITORIAL: Like a trigger-happy tourist, Google has shot almost every street in five US cities and added its pics to what might be the world’s biggest holiday album. But if Google ever starts shooting the streets of Europe, courts here could fight back.

(…)

If you are caught on camera and complain to Google, Google will remove the pics. But that may not be enough for Europe’s courts.

Our data protection regime lets us take holiday snaps, even of strangers, provided we’re doing so for private purposes. But if we’re taking snaps for commercial use, where individuals are identifiable, there is no such exemption. We need to notify the subjects, and that’s hard for Google to do. Even a loudspeaker on top of the camera cars (”Hi, it’s Google here, say ‘cheese’ everybody!”) might not suffice.

The law sets extra requirements for so-called sensitive personal data: it demands explicit consent, not just notification. That means when taking pictures of someone leaving a church or sexual health clinic – which could reveal a religious belief or an illness – camera cars might need to pull over and start picking up signatures.

I understand some people don’t think Google Street View is a privacy nightmare and a stalker’s best friend (that’s actual stalkers, and not the “Facebook Newsfeed” kind of stalker), but these kind of laws just make sense, I think. This “if you’re out in public, people can see you” type of bullshit is getting on my nerves.

Google’s options now seem to be to either do that thing where you take several pictures and splice them together to get rid of the people in it (or essentially the same thing with the longer exposure time, or perhaps use some form of image recognition to automatically find and blur out people in pictures, which would be impressive, technically), or to hide behind varying definitions of “commercial”.
While I don’t like Google, I’ll grant they do tend to not go for the legal jackassery if there’s a techy option available, so I’m guessing they’ll do some variety of the former.

(Via Slashdot.)