Switzerland Kills Street View

Ah, Google (GOOG), weep copious tears for Europe's rocky soil. Your Google Street View service may go over like gangbusters here in the colonies, but the Old World just doesn't want to play.

Consider Britain, where the government briefly considered banning Street View, hundreds of citizens complained that their tendencies to patronize sex shops and vomit outside pubs were being archived for all to see, and a mob chased the Street View camera car out of its green and pleasant subdivision. Or Greece, where years of living under a military dictatorship led the jumpy government to ban Street View outright and declare, "We are not going to allow our country to become a Big Brother society."

Now comes Switzerland, the latest statelet to declare Street View verboten. According to Information Week, Street View had started collecting and posting pics of bucolic Swiss street scenes just one week ago. And already, the country's federal data protection and information commissioner has called on Google to shut the whole thing down. Once again, Google has reportedly failed to blur identifiable faces and license plates enough to satisfy government officials. Representatives of the search giant claimed that the decision left them baffled and surprised. "Since launching last week we have seen an 80% increase in maps usage, proving how popular this tool is with Swiss people," a spokesperson told Information Week.

Fortunately, CNet report Chris Matyszczyk offers a possible clue to the Swiss commissioner's behavior. Just when Google Street View was ramping up, the Swiss newspaper NZZ published a potentially scandalous photograph of a member of Parliament walking down the street with a woman who wasn't his wife. Since the comely lass turned out to be his assistant, the MP announced that "there is probably no problem for my wife." But how many other government officials are walking the streets of Bern with their, um, assistants? Google Street View probably knows. And therein lies the problem.

Faced with such mounting Orwellian fears, Google has decided to nip this problem in the bud, at least in some neighborhoods. Figuring that some folks may find the sight of a car ominously gliding through their streets snapping shots from a tripod mounted on top, the company has replaced the vehicle with ... a tricycle.