Street View has raised privacy concerns wherever it has launched but the UK’s privacy regulator the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that Google’s privacy protections are good enough to protect people’s privacy.
A committee of all 27 EU member states’ privacy regulators, the Article 29 Working Party, has asked Google to ensure, though, that original images are destroyed once they have been used to create blurred images that the public can see.
When introducing Street View to Europe, Google undertook to automatically blur faces and vehicle number plates to protect the privacy of people photographed on the street.
It retains the unblurred originals, and says that these are vital for correcting errors. It has agreed, though, to delete those once they are no longer being used.
Read more on Out-Law.com.