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The European Data Protection Supervisor warned that the StreetView feature of the Google Maps service could breach the EU data protection laws, if they show the pictures taken from the European cities.

The StreetView service makes it possible for users of GoogleMaps to see several photos that show a 360-degree look on how the city streets or crossings are seen at a street level. But they also get in these pictures the pedestrians that are passing by or anyone in the area. The service is available right now only for some US cities, but Google has started the activities in order to get pictures from some European cities. Their fleet of vans with cameras has been spotted in London, Rome or Paris.

The European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx, declared during the press presentation of his annual data protection report:

"I would encourage Google to think about how to do this. Making pictures on the street is in many cases not a problem, but making pictures everywhere is certainly going to create some problems. I'm quite sure they are aware of this."

Google didn't announced when the StreetView feature will be available for the European cities, but the service is expected to be launched next year.

Hustinx warned the company that "Complying with European data protection law is going to be part of their business success or failure. If they would ignore it, it is likely to lead to (court) cases, and I think they would be hit hard."

But Google was already taking into consideration the privacy concerns and announced that they developed a new face-blurring technology that would be perfected in the future. In a blog post on Google Earth and Maps teams, they presented the new change:

"We're also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making -- working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery."

Google also announced that they would delete the images from StreetView if someone complained and they think that these two actions should respond to some of the privacy problems already highlighted.

Street View revisits Manhattan (12.05.2008)
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/05/street-view-revisits-manhat...

Google blurs the privacy issue (13.05.2008)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/13/google.digitalmedia

Google map service could face EU lawsuits (16.05.2008)
http://euobserver.com/9/26154/?rk=1