LocalSwitzerland Relaxes Rules for Google Street View

Switzerland Relaxes Rules for Google Street View

A Swiss court has relaxed the privacy and anonymization requirements being placed on Google's Street View service. Google won't need to guarantee 100 percent accuracy when blurring out the faces of individuals who appear in Street View images.

Google Street View car

A Swiss court has relaxed the privacy and anonymization requirements being placed on Google’s Street View service in the country.

The Swiss Federal Tribunal ruled that the company won’t need to guarantee 100 percent accuracy when blurring out the faces of individuals who appear in Street View images. The ruling overturns a previous decree which required all images be anonymized throughout the service.

“It must be accepted that up to a maximum of 1 percent of the images uploaded are insufficiently anonymized,” the Tribunal was quoted as saying.

Google’s Street View service has fallen under scrutiny in much of Europe, where privacy groups worry that the service is violating the rights of citizens by collecting images without permission.

In addition to forcing the blurring of faces, some countries have placed restrictions on the height of the Street View cameras.

Criticism of the service was heightened when it was revealed that the imaging cars had been covertly harvesting information from passing wireless networks as they recorded street images for the service.

While Google has maintained that the collection of data was not authorized by the company and was not intentionally conducted, the company has drawn the ire of the European Commission over the incident.

This article was originally published on V3.

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