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Street View offers a ground-level, 360-degrees view of all streets in almost 40 cities of the US. However what was intended to help users better relate to their geography is now becoming fertile ground for controversy, attracting allegations of potential privacy intrusion.
Little did Google realize when they sent their specially-equipped vehicles out on the streets to click panoramic images of homes and businesses that these vehicles would also click people exiting strip joints, swimming in their private pools, sunbathing, falling off bikes, and so on.
Natural moments for a lot of people, nevertheless too embarrassing to be etched in memory, let alone collective memory. The scope of Street View's coverage surprised and unsettled several users. So much so privacy advocates the likes of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) rushed suggestions to Google, prominent among which was that the company should blur these and other such images. Google it seems, has finally accepted the suggestion. Starting this week, it is deploying a facial-recognition algorithm to scan photos for mugs to blur. The blurring will first take place within scenes of New York city, then expanding to other US cities that Street View covers.
Google spokesperson Larry Yu said the algorithm is still getting tweaked; as of now, it tends to erroneously blur too many things, which Yu promptly added, is better than leaving too many faces unblurred. Yu stressed that Google is not only responding to privacy complaints within the US but also trying to ward-off legal or cultural objections that might arise as Street View expands into other countries.
Talking of which, we've just got news that the European Union's data protection agency has said the ability of Google's map service to put detailed street-level images on the Internet could raise concerns in Europe if it were to be introduced there. European Union Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx told Reuters, "Making pictures everywhere is certainly going to create some problems." However he also said he is confident Google will take into account European law in any future introduction of the service
