Google’s Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London.
England’s Privacy International doesn’t trust in Google’s ability to automatically blur faces. While in the US, photographing people in the street is absolutely legal without the need to ask for consent, in the UK, anyone who appears in a photo that is used commercially has to grant consent. Google is rumored to have started taking pictures in the UK this week.
However, Google’s experiment with its face blurring technology in New York shows that they are quite capable of employing this technology. Google already blurs all license plate numbers in Street View as well.
This is, of course, a week where Google’s privacy policies have been in the news almost every single day (and where Google finally put its privacy policy on its front page). After
the private data of quite a few of its employees and being forced to release the records of its
, Google was probably hoping to make the news today by having a little Uncle Sam in Street View to celebrate the 4th of July and by releasing Street View for the route of the Tour de France (after all, this is the first European appearance of Street View).
