Google Street View Riles Brits

The hits just keep coming for Google, as privacy advocates rip into the search giant for compromising the confidentiality of both its clients and ordinary people. Last week, following revelations that a small percentage of confidential Google Docs word-processing documents were made available to other people, the D.C. group Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the feds to shut down all Google Apps until the bugs were fixed. (Or at least give EPIC and its fellow travelers $5 million.) Now, hordes of angry British citizens are complaining about Google's Street View, and a privacy group has asked the country's information commissioner to shut down the service altogether.

Here's what's got so many people so angry. When Google Street View got the green light to go ahead last summer, the company promised that it would blur all faces and registration plates before posting them on the Web, according to PC World. Since then, a man has found a shot of himself leaving a sex shop in London, another gentleman was shot disgorging some tasty brew outside a pub, and a woman who had changed homes to escape her batterer found a recognizable shot of herself outside her new house. The complaints prompted jumpy Google lawyer Gavin McGinty to post a statement on the company's Europe public-policy blog, hoping to clear up any "misunderstandings and exaggerations." "When taking images for Street View it is inevitable that we also capture some images of people who happen to be walking by," McGinty wrote, but he reiterated that Google's software automatically blurs identifiable features. In those rare cases where the software doesn't work quite right, citizens are invited to let Google know and someone will take care of it.

Then on Sunday, the Independent ran a story claiming that Google Street View has posted a shot of a naked child playing in a park and that the image could be kiddie porn fodder. "The pictures of young children suggest the service could be exploited for more sinister purposes," wrote Political Editor Jane Merrick.

This really got under Google's skin, and the company's head Europe flack DJ Collins immediately posted a statement denying the story. Yes, the kid was in the picture, Collins wrote, but he was so far away that his image was pixilated beyond the point of recognition. In any case, the child's back was to the camera, so no one could see his or her face. "Since publication, the Independent on Sunday has agreed to correct the original story, which painted a highly misleading picture," Collins wrote, but the damage appears to have been done, as he was forced to insist, "At Google we are committed to protecting child safety," which isn't exactly the sort of assurance any company wants to be forced to make.

Now, Privacy International has collected 200 complaints from people unhappy about their sudden celebrity and used them as evidence to demand that the British government pull Street View completely. "We're asking for the system to be switched off while an investigation is completed," said PI director Simon Davies. Google has taken this complaint so seriously that Eric Schmidt personally talked to the BBC and promised that the company takes privacy very seriously. But he couldn't resist rather snottily claiming: "We are getting controversy over street view because it is so successful. It turns out that people love to see what is going on in their local community." That sort of tin ear won't exactly win him an army of converts.

In fact, Google could face similar problems all over the continent. PC World reporter Daniel Ionescu claims that "Street View is now also facing threats of legal action in Germany, as the country has strong privacy safeguards." And in Italy, four Google executives, including Chief Counsel David Drummond, former Chief Financial Officer George Reyes, Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer, and former Google Video Europe head Arvind Desikan, have been charged with defamation and violations of privacy laws after someone posted a video of four teenagers ridiculing a child with Downs Syndrome. Google has long promised to digitize and organize as much of the world's information as it can; clearly, some folks wonder if that's such a good idea.