News: More Complaints About Google Street View

EDRI: Complaints against Google in France and Switzerland. The French Data Protection Agency (CNIL) has reported several complaints against Google Street View, citing flaws and delays in the blurring technology leaving some people's images untouched, and calling for other sensitive visible information - such as access to people's homes - to also be blurred. Google had earlier agreed to improvements and deletion of some raw images before the EC's Article 29 Working Party.

Meanwhile in Switzerland the country's Data Protection Commissioner have called for the interruption of Street View less than a week after it went live, demanding that the blurring technology be improved. This is a demand they have agreed to, but that has not reassured everyone in the debate:

Sébastien Fanti, a lawyer specialised in Internet issues, warns on the fact that all the data gathered by Google is available to US authorities as according to the USA Patriot Act, any US government agency has access to data collected anywhere in the world by US firms, even without a court order. "If the CIA asks to see what was going on in Zurich this spring, Google isn't going to provide blurred images," says Fanti.

Google's Switzerland spokesman Matthias Meyer admitted that the companies is collaborating with authorities but stated that "What we are putting on line are photos of the past. Once they've been taken they don't change, nothing is shown in real time."