Google has had a very tough month in the EU, and it isn't getting any better. So far, its executives have been convicted in Italian courts and an investigation has been launched into whether the company's search rankings are anticompetitive. Now, a different service has found itself in the crosshairs of European regulators: Street View. The EU has been uneasy about Street View from the very beginning, and several Europeans nation has taken action against it. For Street View, this week has been déjà vu all over again.On the continental level, the Associated Press obtained a letter from EU regulators to Google in which they expressed concern about the company's retention policy for Street View images (Reuters is reporting this as well). It's undoubtedly fairly expensive to completely crawl a city or country, which would make it advantageous to retain images for as long as possible. The downside to this is that the images can go stale—buildings are torn down, new ones built, and businesses come and go. Google has apparently decided, undoubtedly after running the numbers through one algorithm or another, that its ideal retention time for Street View images is a year.
As far as the EU is concerned, that's way too long. Its letter to Google requested that the company shorten the retention period from a year to six months. Concerns were also raised about whether the search giant needs to retain unblurred images internally. The EU would also like to see an improved warning system for areas that will be imaged, with Google paying for notifications in local newspapers.
On the national level, Germany has also raised a number of concerns about the service, but the company will apparently launch the service this year. Despite the host country's uneasiness about Street View, the AFP quotes a member of Google's legal team in Germany as saying, "It is difficult to forbid a company to do something that is legal."
The AFP's author points out how the country's 20th century history might make it uneasy with a massive image database, given the extensive state surveillance that took place in East Germany, as well as the totalitarian regime that preceded it.
Regardless of the frequent local opposition, it's clear that Google views Street View as a valuable commodity, and intends to keep pushing it into as many countries as it can. But, given differing cultural views on privacy and vastly different legal structures, the approach that the EU would clearly like to take—fine tuning the parameters of the service, rather than an outright ban—may eventually make it difficult for Google to run the service on its own terms.
Source: Arstechnica.com
