Google hit again with Street View privacy concerns - in Switzerland

First it was Canada, then in Google's own back yard in the U.S. and now other countries are following suit with privacy concerns over Google's Street View image database. Switzerland has been reviewing privacy concerns about Street View for the past year.

Google had some significant challenges deploying street view images of Canadian cities and towns based based upon complaints from the Canadian Privacy Commission. Google's solution was to blur out the images of licence plates and faces. Canada's Privacy Commissioner (and others) and reviewed the solution and blessed it. Google thought this would be the right path for other countries. Turns out, it's not enough. In a BBC report, a Swiss court has instructed Google to pull all images in Street View, saying that it did not make sufficiently 'unrecognizable' people in images published.

It's not just images of people that also concerns the Swiss authorities - it's where, such as hospitals, prisons and other sensitive areas. That has not been brought up in other countries as an issue - yet. Google has blurred images of licence plates and peoples faces in all the cities I checked, Vancouver, B.C. near Canada Place, New York City on Wall Street and Geneva, Switzerland.

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Here are three images I created using Google's Street View service.

Vancouver, B.C.

New York City, New York

Geneva Switzerland