Google boosting quality of Street View images [update]

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 11:24

Your IT - Home IT

"All pre-existing take-down requests will be honoured when we do the new imagery," Google's ANZ public relations manager Annie Baxter told iTWire.

Street View has been controversial since its inception. Google responded by adding automatic face blurring, but concerns continued to be expressed in the UK, Greece and Switzerland, among other places.

A privacy infringement case involving the Street View cars entering private land reached a US court, and there was evidence of similar events occurring in Australia.

Last month, the company announced that it would not keep any unblurred images - even for internal use - for longer than one year after they are first published on Street View (or after October 7, 2010, whichever is the later).

Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleisher said that priority would be given to permanently blurring images that people had specifically asked to be removed from Street View.

Other places where Google is currently collecting or refreshing Street View images include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and United Kingdom.

Google recently revealed that it had created a human-powered vehicle to collect 'off-street view' images in areas such as pedestrian malls, parks, and sports venues.