Google pulls Street View images

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 20 Mar 2009 at 14:34

Google has begun yanking pictures from its Street View service following complaints from members of the public.

Street View provides street-level photography of most of the UK's major cities, offering users the chance to take a virtual tour around town.

In order to capture the photographs a Google car fitted with a 360 degree camera has toured 22,369 miles of UK streets, taking in London, Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford.

Due to the indiscriminate nature of the process, Google has developed software to automatically blur faces and number plates, but this hasn't been enough for some members of the public and the company has begun to take down offending images.

Among the casualties are the already infamous picture of a man being sick on the street, another man urinating in public and the house of a PC Pro staff member - hopefully removed for neither of those reasons.

Google claims the removal of the pictures - which are replaced with a black box and the caption "this image is no longer available" - is proof of its sensitivity to people's concerns.

"Since launching yesterday, we have received very few removals requests," Google spokesperson Laura Scott told PC Pro. "However, we're very pleased, where removals or further blurring has been requested, that the technology has been working so effectively and that in most cases images have been removed within hours."

Scott wouldn't comment on the specific number of complaints received, or the process Google undertakes to decide whether to take an image down.

However, its sop to public concerns isn't enough for Privacy International, which has already announced it's planning a legal challenge to the service, claiming "the images are being captured without people's permission for commercial use, and we believe that it is not legally acceptable."