Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 10, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The decisive factor was the appearance of detailed images of Fort Sam Houston, an army base in the US state of Texas, on the geographical service Google Maps. In particular, the video footage easily accessible through the Street View feature represented a “potential security threat”, the Pentagon said yesterday, Thursday, explaining its decision. “The images include 360-degree views of the area and show the precise locations of guard posts, barriers, headquarters and the other facilities,” a US news agency quotes General Rene Renuart of the Department of Defense. The disputed images have now been removed and a special directive issued to all military bases in the USA. It prohibits their commanders from allowing Google employees access to the grounds to take images inside in future.
Google spokesman Larry Yu has meanwhile told BBC News that taking images of the Texas military base was a mistake. Documenting such sensitive locations in detail was not really consistent with Google’s philosophy. “We also take an accommodating approach to deleting images,” Yu stresses. This applies not only to military facilities but equally to ordinary citizens. “If someone complains to us, the relevant images are removed,” Kay Oberbeck, spokesman for Google Northern Europe, also states in response to an enquiry from pressetext. However, the issue is not yet as relevant to Europe, since Google is currently taking images for the Street View feature only in the USA. “There are currently no concrete plans for when we will commission teams to take such images outside the USA as well,” says Oberbeck.
“There have already been critical comments about Street View from a data-protection perspective for some time,” Rena Tangens, Board Member of the Verein zur Förderung des öffentlichen bewegten und unbewegten Datenverkehrs, tells the news service pressetext.de. “The service adds another piece to the mosaic that makes it possible to restrict citizens’ privacy further,” Tangens says. In principle, the feature is a “nice toy”, but people also need to be aware of the dangers associated with it. “If images are only deleted once the first protests arrive, it could already be too late in some circumstances,” Tangens adds.
As part of its geographical service Google Maps http://maps.google.com Google offers Street View, a still relatively new feature. A 360-degree camera with eleven lenses takes an image every two seconds. The resulting photographs are then combined into a photorealistic, detailed representation of the surrounding area. A total of 30 US cities have now been recorded in this way. For users, this process has the advantage that they can freely control their virtual tours of the documented regions.
