New Questions Over Google's Street View in Germany
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BERLIN -- Google's plan to offer Street View photo mapping in Germany, which has bumped up against the country's strict privacy laws, has come in for renewed criticism after regulators learned that the company, a search engine giant, was also archiving the locations of household wireless networks.
Google's Street View technology has been accepted in countries like Britain and France, but has encountered greater resistance in Germany and Switzerland, where data privacy laws are stricter than in the rest of Europe or in the United States.
German data protection officials had initially questioned the legality of Street View but dropped their objections last July after Google agreed to hide details of faces, license plates and house numbersthrough pixilation, and to give citizens the option of removing their property entirely from the 360-degree photo archive. Since then, hundreds have made such requests.
Google intends to activate the service in Germany by the end of the year.
But the controversy resurfaced last week, when data protection regulators in several German states said they were surprised to learn that Google was also recording the location of wireless routers with its roving cameras and antennas.
Routers for W.L.A.N.'s, or wireless local area networks, provide wireless Internet in homes and businesses. Each broadcasts a unique identification number, a so-called MAC address, and a device name chosen by its owner.
Germany's data protection administrator, Peter Schaar, asked Google to end the practice immediately. But Google has continued to collect the data.
Kay Overbeck, a Google spokesman in Hamburg, said W.L.A.N. data were in the public domain in Germany. "What we are doing is totally legal and is being done by other companies around the world and in Germany," he said.
Google has compiled similar archives around the world, Mr. Overbeck said, and has never made a secret of its project. Other organizations routinely collate such information, like Skyhook in the United States and Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, he said.
The project is designed to promote services like location-based advertising for mobile phones, which can sometime be pinpointed via a W.L.A.N. network even if they lack a GPS satellite receiver. Google has no plans to publish its archive or to link W.L.A.N. devices to individual users, Mr. Overbeck said.
"We did not mention the W.L.A.N. project during our discussions with data protection officials because it is not related to Street View," Mr. Overbeck said.
First Published May 1, 2010 2:00 am
