Google Street View Confronted with Privacy Issues

Google Street View is faced with privacy issues in Britain. It seems that the photographs, linked to locations, may contravene existing legislation:

“…The company has said it had begun to trial face blurring technology, using an algorithm that detects human faces in photographs.

But Privacy International says it has doubts about the technology.”

link: Google faces ‘Street View block’

The irony is that Britain has been labeled the “Surveillance Society”. In late April of 2007, it was reported that there were over four million surveillance cameras, “one for every fourteen people“. That number has increased with more government surveillance and private security monitoring. There is no tracking how these surveillance images are archived and/or used. It just seems that the focus on Google’s image captures for Street View is a belated privacy concern. The expectation of privacy in public places in Britain was obliterated long ago, when citizen were monitored and tracked in the name of security surveillance.

Catherine Forsythe