Google Street View under legal pressure in Switzerland
Ralf Haller
August 23rd, 2009
Image: Flickr/Paul Shaffner
As the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger writes, the new launch of Google StreetView in Switzerland creates lots of protests among private people, companies, communities as well as annoys the country’s top data security officer, Hanspeter Thür. Already on Friday this Swiss data security officer announced that he would order to shut down the service if Google should not - as they actually already agreed prior to the launch of its service - take off faces, car license plates and other private information. In Europe and even more so I feel in Switzerland people do not take privacy issues that lightly as maybe it is done in the US.
The deal with other countries where Google will take such information off when people ask them to do so is not what they agreed to in Switzerland. They want Google to take it off immediately prior to going live. I think this is not that easy to do and for sure quite time consuming and costly. It might well be that Google decides to not offer this service in Switzerland at all. I would find that a shame, but try to argue with people who are paranoid when they see their house on the Internet. They should be maybe more concerned about what possibilities the military or the police has to check them out, but that is not known in public. To me they make an elephant out if a fly and as usual Google is quite amateurish in handling it.