April 2009
Google's Street View: What's All The Fuss About?
Now that the dust has settled on Google’s latest innovation, Google Street View, and we have all had an opportunity to look up images of our houses or where we grew up, a privacy campaigner is beginning a legal challenge against the controversial site. For those of you who have had their head in the sand for the past few weeks, Google Street View is the latest fad offered by the Californian based web giants which allows people to zoom in on photographs of streets in 25 towns and cities all over the UK. The photographs were taken over the course of last summer when Google sent drivers all over the UK and built up a huge photo bank of images. But in taking pictures of random people on the street or their houses, and then putting these images on the internet for the world to see, have Google done anything illegal? The answer is most probably no.
This has not stopped Privacy International's Simon Davies arguing that under privacy laws Google should have obtained consent from every single person who features in the photographs, and he has filed a complaint to this effect with the Information Commissioner's Office. There are two many issues here: firstly there is the right to privacy under the Human Rights Act as transposed by the European Convention of Human Rights, and secondly there is the Data Protection legislation.
Briffa’s Comment:
The case law does not support the human rights argument since in order for a photograph taken on the street to infringe a person’s privacy the person needs to be the focus of the picture. This was the case when the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of JK Rowling after a paparazzi had taken a picture of her infant son in 2008. The Court of Appeal in that case said: "If the photographs had been taken ... to show the scene in a street by a passer-by and later published as street scenes, that would be one thing, but they were not taken as street scenes but were taken deliberately, in secret and with a view to their subsequent publication." Therefore this seems to rule out Street View since Google's specific focus is on the street scenes and not individuals.
Meanwhile the Data Protection Act only requires Google to notify people when they are collecting their personal data. Usually Google would not require the consent of the people in the photographs unless it was a portrait photograph used for commercial purposes which for the reasons stated above is not the case here. It is unclear whether taking a photograph of a person on the street involves processing their personal data, and this has so far not been tested in court. If Mr Davies proceeds with his personal crusade then we may just get some guidance on this point. However Google can always argue that they already use software to blur out people’s faces and other personal details like vehicle registration plates. They have also encouraged people to contact them if they are not comfortable be caught on camera. So it seems that the world is still a safe place despite Google’s domination.
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