Google rejects German criticism of Street View (News Feature)

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Mar 2, 2010, 15:36 GMT

Hanover, Germany - Web search company Google rejected Tuesday claims that its Street View service, which already depicts 19 nations in street level photographs, will be illegal under German law.

Controversy has swirled around the house-by-house photographs in Germany where critics even claim they might enable burglars to analyse the locks on house doors online before they stage break-ins.

Google plans to put its album of photos of Germany online this year.

Kay Overbeck, chief spokesman for Google Germany, said the US company was working with German government privacy commissioners to resolve the objections.

'Fundamentally, Street View is legal,' he told a news conference at the CeBIT electronics trade fair in the German city of Hanover.

Although the company is not an exhibitor at CeBIT, it rented space there to stage a tongue-in-cheek graffiti attack on three of its own camera cars, which have crawled the kerbs of Europe taking pictures of building facades.

Art students smeared a palette of bright colours over the clean black cars, drawing blobs and figures on them. A Google executive said the colour attack, which was inspired by the multi-coloured Google logo, was a piece of fun 'rebranding' by the unconventional company.

A series of German politicians have claimed the photos, which have been taken over the past year and a half but are still not public, will be threat to the privacy of German homes.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Germans to tell Google in advance not to photograph their homes if they are worried about privacy.

Overbeck said a 'four-digit' number of Germans had filed such objections in recent months.

He said Google would take down pictures regardless of whether it was the tenant or the freeholder who complained.

He denied a claim by German Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner that the pictures would disclose the locking system on a door and become a security risk. He said the images were far too grainy for a lock to be clearly visible.

Overbeck also rejected claims that it was illegal to export the raw photos from Germany.

He said Google had submitted to the same 'safe harbour' agreement that applies to banks, meaning it abides by German privacy legislation even when German data is stored in another nation.

Michael Jones, chief technology advocate at Google, told reporters Google had never encountered before such objections as it faced in Germany and Switzerland, but was negotiating solutions.

'We don't think we are in a battle with the privacy people,' he said. 'We don't agree with everything they say, but we are working with them.'

CeBIT, which runs from Tuesday to Saturday, is a show of software and computer parts with about 4,150 exhibitors this year.