Google Gets To Shoot Brits

Google's (GOOG) Street View camera cars are revving up around Britain once more, as the country's information commissioner has rejected a request to shut down Google Street View on the grounds that the service violates citizens' privacy rights.

When the service was launched in March, hundreds of people immediately complained that their faces and cars were recognizable in street photographs despite Google's promise to automatically blur them. One gentleman was shot purging his gullet of a certain barley-based beverage outside a pub. Another gent was caught taking his leave of one of the kingdom's finer sex shops. One woman, who had moved to avoid an abusive spouse, saw an image of herself outside her new home. Residents of the tony village of Broughton, apparently worried that Street View would allow burglars to case their homes, mobbed in front of a Street View driver and forced him to flee back to the U.K. GooglePlex.

Armed with such complaints, and fueled by tabloid hysteria, the group Privacy International filed a formal request that the information commissioner shut down Google Street View until the company guarantees that all faces and license plates would be rendered unrecognizable from the start. Google's software blurs most faces and plates, but some visages inevitably escape the bots' vigilance. Google representatives insist that anyone who notices themselves in Street View only has to contact the company and Google's pixels will go to work pronto.

According to the U.K. Guardian, that argument, as well as the inevitability of information technology, was sufficient to sway the IC, which promised to keep a close eye on Google but allowed the company to keep archiving street scenes around the country. Killing Street View altogether, IC representatives concluded in a statement, would be "disproportionate to the relatively small risk of privacy detriment."

In any case, added IC official Dan Evans, social networking and other technologies are simply evolving too fast for the government to deploy so crude a cudgel as a ban: "In a world where many people tweet, Facebook and blog, it is important to take a common sense approach towards Street View and the relatively limited privacy intrusion it may cause."

Oxford privacy expert Ian Brown told the BBC that this ruling only underscores the fact that the information commissioner is reacting too slowly to changes in computer technology, only noticing that a vast infrastructure of data has been assembled when it's too late to do anything about it. "The Information Commissioner needs to be involved at a much earlier stage; in other words, when it is being designed and not finished," he said.