A privacy agency in Switzerland said it plans to sue Google over its Street View feature.
Street View allows users to see street-level pictures online. The application has been criticized by other European countries because it could expose private or embarrassing things about people’s lives, according to an Associated Press article.
The Swiss agency said it wants Google to ensure that all license plates, faces and private streets are blurred. It also wants at least one-week notice of when Google will be in the area taking photographs and when it will be available online.
“In the Street View service, which has been online since mid August 2009, numerous faces and vehicle number plates are not made sufficiently unrecognizable from the point of view of data protection, especially where the persons concerned are shown in sensitive locations, e.g. outside hospitals, prisons or schools,” said Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, Hanspeter Thür in a news release.
The commission maintains that previous advance information from Google has been incomplete.
“Google announced that it would primarily be filming urban centres, but then put comprehensive images of numerous towns and cities on the Internet,” said Thür. “In outlying districts, where there are far fewer people on the streets, the simple blurring of faces is no longer sufficient to conceal identities. This is primarily due to the website’s zoom function, which enables the Street View user to isolate and enlarge images of individuals on the screen.”