Google's European Problem

When Google (GOOG) tried to expand its Street View service to Europe, the company almost immediately ran into problems. Legions of Britons complained that Street View took photographs of ordinary people in potentially embarrassing circumstances and slapped them on the Web. In one posh township outside of London, a mob of people surrounded a Street View camera car and politely told the driver to take his tripod somewhere else. The government information commissioner even considered banning Street View altogether, at least until more stringent privacy safeguards were put in place. But in the end, Google got to shoot snaps of the streets of Sussex after all.

The company hasn't been so lucky in Greece, where the country's Hellenic Data Protection Authority (gotta love that name!) has banned the service outright. According to the UK Guardian, Google won't be able to photograph and upload shots of Greek streets unless the company explains how long it intends to store photographs in its sytem and submits an elaborate plan to inform citizens of their rights when being photographed. If that sounds logistically impossible, you may well be right. But Greece's years of living under military dictatorships have left her citizens with a heightened antipathy to being monitored. "We are not going to allow our country to become a Big Brother society," one government official told the Guardian.

Google has issued a response, in which it declares how much it values privacy, blurs all faces and license plates, and will surely be up and running in Greece just as soon as this whole thing gets worked out. But according to the BBC, privacy advocates intend to push on and lock Google out of more than just Greece. "Now we wait for the domino effect, as the Greek decision sets an example that others may follow," said Privacy International director Simon Davies. "We will see what happens next in Central Europe."

Meanwhile, Microsoft is angling to give Google even more headaches in Europe. The software company is pushing back against the European Commission's efforts to force it to bundle Chrome in the European version of Windows, arguing that doing so would give Google too much power over the Internet. That sounds silly at first, since nobody uses Chrome as their browser. But as Industry Standard writer Paul Boutin notes, the company may have a point, but not in the way it intended. Chrome, Boutin argues, is simply better than Internet Explorer; it's faster and more secure, to name a few qualities. As soon as people realize Chrome's superiority, Internet Explorer will end up on the ash heap of history. "If Google ends up with a majority share of browser users tied to Chrome, and Google's search engine is their most frequent and trusted destination, think of the opportunities for Google to leverage that huge group of people," Boutin concludes.