Happy July 4th. ... it seems fitting that the UK may be about to try and take a small step towards independence from the US, at least as far as Google is concerned. There's news today that Privacy International may refer Google to the UK Information Commissioner's Office over concerns about privacy violation, as Google apparently starts the process of photographing street frontages to add to its "Street View" service. PI reckon that, because Street View is a commercial service, the publication of people's faces without their consent is likely to violate UK law.
I mention this not in order to have a crack at Google - though I do think that, as a global corporation, they might do a better job of catering visibly for national differences in privacy law - but because it touches on two issues which crop up fairly frequently in this blog:
- the nature and scope of 'personally identifiable information' and
- the effective regulation of passive data capture (notably, CCTV and other image capture technologies).
Here and here are a couple of previous posts on the topic. The first considers some of the weaknesses in the UK's current laws on the topic, and the other looks at the issue of how service providers can possibly cope, if significant numbers of people decide to exercise their privacy rights and request their images to be removed.
That's something the folks at Google might want to bear in mind.
![[RSS Newsfeed]](/themes/sotto/images/valid-rss.png)
![[This is a Roller site]](/themes/sotto/images/roller-logo.gif){kind=logo}