Street View in (kind of) Swiss roll-over Google has agreed to a demand that it apply extra blur to faces and number plates to its Street View service in Switzerland, but has refused to lower the height of its car-mounted spycams. Street View launched in Switzerland in mid-August, and the country's head of federal data protection, Hans-Peter Thür, was quickly rattling …
Delete * from doogle.datacentres where countryfield=Switzerland
Just eliminate the country from Google in its entirety. No Search results, No Gmail for the country, maybe just a green/white splodge on the satellite maps where the country used to be. They'll soon come crawling back!
I am astonished that everyone is ridiculing the Swiss instead of asking why no other Data Protection office has had the balls to stand up to Google.
The logical conclusion is that over 9 years of Blair/Bush "terrorists are bad, give up your privacy" indoctrination has indeed worked. No more need for that pesky 8th Human Right then, of course - go ahead, print your salary on your forehead, remove all the curtains and make sure you leave your letters opened on top of your letterbox.
No? Why? Got something to hide?
Wake up..
Unconditionally, my right to privacy is greater than your desire to perv. Are you one of those creeps who stands on a box to look over somebody's garden hedge or into their windows?
If you live in a country whose MPs are more worried about getting their cut and institutionalising spying than supporiting the privacy and independence of its people, change your MPs or change your country.
How many times is this going to happen?
1. Google agrees with countries data, privacy, police chiefs about what they want to do with Street View
2. Google does it's Street View thing
3. Street View goes live
4. Countries data, privacy and police chiefs all moan and tell Google how outrageous this is, who would possibly agree to such a thing.
This is quite cheeky of the Swiss, who in some respects have some shocking data privacy practices. For example, you can send a car's reg plate number by SMS and you get a nice reply of the owners name and address! Surely this is potentially more of an issue then a blury / not blury enough plate!
"No more need for that pesky 8th Human Right then, of course - go ahead, print your salary on your forehead, remove all the curtains and make sure you leave your letters opened on top of your letterbox."
So tell me, how does having a few photos of the outside of my house on Street View compare, in even the slightest degree, to the sort of privacy invasion you're referring to here? I wouldn't particularly want any old Tom, Dietrich or Harbinder around the world knowing my salary or reading my personal mail, but giving them a few slightly blurry exterior photos of my house is a giant No Big Deal to me.
I'm sorry, but until someone gives me a damn good reason to worry about Street View, I'm going to stay firmly in the "really couldn't give a flying whatsit if Google want to spend all their money taking photos of the outside of buildings from public roads/paths" camp...
I'd even go one step further than this and say that I wish Google (or someone else) had been around doing this on a regular basis since the birth of photography - whilst it'll be nice in decades to come to be able to look back on what my old haunts used to look like in the good old days of 2008/9, I'd love to be able to turn the clock back *right now* and do a virtual drive-past of places I now only sort of remember from my childhood back in the 70's and 80's, which are now long since redeveloped and bear hardly any resemblance to how I remember them looking.
Then, having spent god knows how many hours doing that, I'd then like to turn the clock back some more and see how the places familiar to me now looked in the decades and centuries prior to my birth. Sure, I can scour the bookstores and libraries looking for old photos, but at best they'll only provide a very narrow window into a handful of areas, rather than the free-roaming wide-angle window now provided by Street View.
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