Street View has raised privacy concerns wherever it has launched
but the UK's privacy regulator the Information Commissioner's
Office (ICO) has said that Google's privacy protections are good
enough to protect people's privacy.
A committee of all 27 EU member states' privacy regulators, the
Article 29 Working Party, has asked Google to ensure, though, that
original images are destroyed once they have been used to create
blurred images that the public can see.
When introducing Street View to Europe, Google undertook to
automatically blur faces and vehicle number plates to protect the
privacy of people photographed on the street.
It retains the unblurred originals, and says that these are
vital for correcting errors. It has agreed, though, to delete those
once they are no longer being used.
"The Article 29 Working Party has asked that we set a time limit
on how long we keep the unblurred copies of panoramas from Street
View, in a way that appropriately balances the use of this data for
legitimate purposes with the need to deal with any potential
concerns from individuals who might feature incidentally on the
Street View imagery," said Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy
counsel, in a blog post.
Fleischer said that the original images were useful to Google
because its automated software was not yet perfect.
"One of the technical challenges at stake with Street View – or
any service that uses image detector software – is that the
software sometimes makes mistakes, labelling part of the image as
containing a face or a license plate when in fact it doesn't. While
we like to think we've gotten pretty good at this stuff, we still
have lots of these 'false positives'," he said. "We're constantly
working on ways to improve our technology, and we are constantly
training it to detect more of the relevant stuff, while reducing
the number of 'false positives' it creates. To do this, though, we
need access to the original unblurred copies of the images."
Google has said that it will comply with the Working Party's
request for image deletion, though.
"We've communicated to the Article 29 Working Party that we will
meet their request that long term we only keep the blurred copy of
Street View panoramas, and we will work with them and our engineers
to determine the shortest retention period that also allows for
legitimate use under EU laws," said Fleischer.
The Working Party also asked Google to publicise where and when
it will collect images.
"They have asked us to continue to provide advance notice to the
public about the project before we start driving in a new country,"
said Fleischer.
The company said that it would try to comply with that request
where possible.
"[It] can be tricky at times to say exactly where our cars will
be and when; we're affected by lots of things outside our control
such as the weather and lighting conditions, we also rely on the
local knowledge of our drivers to decide which places it is best to
drive when, taking into account traffic conditions and other local
factors," said Fleischer. "Nonetheless, we are committed to working
within the Article 29 Working Party's guidelines on this
issue."
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