Google Street View condemned by privacy campaigners

Published on Tuesday 24 March 2009 14:12

PRIVACY campaigners have made a formal complaint about Google's controversial new mapping service, it was disclosed today.

Privacy International has lodged the complaint with the Information Commissioner over claims that a number of people are identifiable through the Street View service.

The application allows users to access 360-degree views of roads and homes in 25 British towns and cities and includes photographs of millions of residential addresses, people and cars.

Sophisticated technology has been developed automatically to obscure the faces of people featured in Street View photographs, and car registration plates have been blurred, but this has failed to quieten critics, with many labelling the maps voyeuristic and intrusive.

Scores of pictures, including one of a man exiting a Soho sex shop and another of a man being sick on the pavement outside a pub in Shoreditch, were removed from Street View on Friday, a day after its fanfare launch in the UK.

But the service has proved a hit with intrigued British internet users.

Google Maps UK received one in every 250 UK internet visits on Friday, with onsite traffic rising by 41%, web monitoring firm Hitwise claimed.

The firm added that US Google Maps posted an 84% increase in visits as British web users began checking out places in America.

The Information Commissioner's Officer (ICO) confirmed they had received a complaint from Privacy International.

A spokesman said it was Google's responsibility to make sure all vehicle registration marks and faces were satisfactorily blurred.

He said: "We will look at the complaint that Privacy International have made and we will respond shortly.

"What we have been saying for some time – over the last few days – is that it is Google's responsibility to make sure that the images that they use are blurred satisfactorily.

"If anybody is not happy with an image that they see then they should contact Google and get it taken down."

A Google spokeswoman said on Saturday that the number of removal requests had reached the "hundreds", but it had been "less than expected" given the "tens of millions" of images available on the site.

She said that when Street View was announced for the UK the company had explained its easy-to-use removals process for images people found "inappropriate" by simply clicking to report a concern and report the image.

Most images had been removed within hours of receiving a request and users could request car number plates to be more effectively blurred or images of their homes removed, she said.