Archive notice: This article was originally published on June 4, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The small town of North Oaks in the US state of Minnesota has successfully challenged images taken for Google’s Street View photo mapping service. As the industry portal Cnet reports, the roads in the town of around 4,500 residents are privately owned. Signs reading “No Through Traffic” inform visitors of this as they enter the town. But when images of the private roads nevertheless recently appeared on the Internet as part of the geographical service Google Maps and its Street View feature, not only the residents but also the town’s top authorities were astonished. In a letter to the search engine operator, the town council clarified that the ban on driving on the roads also applied to the camera-equipped cars that take pictures of many US cities for Google. Google subsequently had to remove the images in question from its image database.
“We are certainly not an arrogant people trying to shut ourselves off from the rest of the world”, Thomas Watson, mayor of North Oaks, tells the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. But Google must abide by the applicable rules. The Internet corporation has no right to drive on the town’s roads, let alone take photographs while doing so. “Google had absolutely no authorisation to enter private property”, Watson stresses.
“It really is extremely rare for an entire town to want to be removed from Street View”, says Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo. “Wherever we take images for Street View, we comply with the prevailing law”, stresses Kay Oberbeck, spokesman for Google Northern Europe, in response to an enquiry from the news service pressetext.de. This often differs considerably from country to country. “To make this service, which is currently only available in the USA, usable in Europe as well, we need to consider some modifications”, Oberbeck explains. However, anyone who feels that certain images infringe their personal rights can contact Google at any time and explain their criticism. “A complaints mechanism for disproportionate photos was integrated into Street View from the start”, Oberbeck explains. To make the service safer, the company has also developed its own software that obscures people’s faces.
Back in early March, the US Department of Defense banned the search engine operator from filming on US military bases. 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 posed a “potential security threat”, the Pentagon said in explaining its decision. Only recently, it became known that Google could soon launch the service in Europe as well. “We currently have no concrete plans as to which cities and countries we will launch Street View in”, Oberbeck concludes.
