Nick Collins reports:
Google failed to consider the safety of vulnerable women when it revealed the location of a secret refuge centre for at-risk women, an MP has claimed.
He accused the search engine of a “staggering” invasion of privacy of the organisation, which houses women and children who have fled abusive homes and therefore depend on the building’s “anonymity”.
Mark Lancaster, a Conservative MP, claimed Google had not only compromised the security of the building by publicising its full address alongside a picture of the exterior, but had also refused to respond to requests to remove the information.
Read more in the Telegraph.
Google, of course, is “urgently” trying to follow up on this matter.
Has Google ever published any statement on precisely how long it takes for them to remove information from Street View and cache?
To remove an image from Street View, the process is to go to the image of the location on your screen, click the small “Report a Problem” link on the bottom left of the image, and then fill out a form. The form asks you to indicate whether the concern is Privacy, Inappropriate Content, or Other. Security is a subheading of Other. The user is also asked to describe the problem after picking a general heading. Maybe they should have an explicit heading, “Endangers physical or personal safety” that gets bumped to the head of their to-do list?