Google gets the green light for Street View from the Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner

Google is now allowed to photograph Swiss cities for its new Street View service. A 360-degree camera mounted on the roof of a car will record everything and everyone. According to the Sonntagszeitung newspaper, the Federal Data Protection Commissioner Hanspeter Thür has given his approval. The procedure has been criticized by Swiss data protectionists. The fact that Google uses software to make faces and license plates unrecognizable before publishing the images is not enough for them. The problem with Street View is that the anonymization only takes place afterwards, Beat Rudin, data protection officer for the canton of Basel-Stadt, told the Sonntagszeitung newspaper. Google stores the non-anonymized raw data on its servers, including abroad - according to spokesperson Matthias Meyer, in order to improve the anonymization software.
The Street View service is an extension for the Google Earth and Google Maps map services and is currently being prepared by Google in Switzerland. It offers users the opportunity to explore cities from a pedestrian perspective. Street View was launched in the USA in May 2009 and the service has been steadily expanding ever since. The USA, Australia and New Zealand are covered virtually nationwide. In France, England, Italy, Spain, Japan and the Netherlands, razor-sharp images of the largest cities are online. Images are currently being taken in eleven other countries, including Switzerland.