25th April 2008 4:17 pm Google

Claudine Beaumont, Digital Channel Editor for The Telegraph has written an article musing on whether Google Street would be able to launch in the UK without facing legal challenges from those who are captured by their roaming camera cars.

“How would you feel if you Googled your home address and were confronted with a picture that showed you watering your flowers? Or standing bleary-eyed at the kitchen window, drinking a cup of tea? What would your reaction be if you Googled the details of a marriage guidance office, and up popped a picture of an unsuspecting couple leaving the therapy centre? Would you consider such photos intrusive - an invasion of privacy, even?

In the US, search giant Google has embarked on an ambitious project to photograph all the roads in major cities. Specially equipped vans drive through quiet suburbs and bustling towns, snapping pictures using the multi-lens camera mounted on their roof. These pictures are then added to Google Maps, creating a service known as Street View, in which users can Google an address or intersection and see panoramic photographs of that road.

So far, around 32 US cities have been photographed by the Street View vans. These mobile units stick strictly to public streets, but that hasn’t stopped the service, which launched in 2007, attracting widespread criticism. One New Yorker, Mary Kalin-Casey, contacted the BoingBoing technology blog to complain that when she Googled her address, a detailed picture of her house popped up, showing her tabby cat standing at the window of her home. “I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes,” she told the site. “I feel like I need to close all my curtains now.”

Even the Pentagon has fallen victim to Google’s long lens. The US military asked Google to remove pictures of the Fort Sam Houston army base in Texas. Photographs of the base taken from the public highway showed the exact position of guards, control points, barriers, and security facilities and posed “a risk to our force protection efforts”, according to a spokesman for the US Northern Command.

Although Google will not comment on plans to launch the Street View service outside of the United States, it is likely that it will come to the UK at some point - and that will open a whole can of worms where privacy laws are concerned, says one leading lawyer.

“The question is whether these Street View pictures would be considered personal data,” says Rosemary Jay, a lawyer with Pinsent Masons specialising in data protection, human rights and freedom of information law. “We need to separate those circumstances where what is photographed shows someone doing something sensitive, personal or private, and those circumstances where it doesn’t.

“In those circumstances where it does show somebody doing something personal or private, then privacy litigation and data protection laws would kick in, and I think you could look for protection.”

The problem, says Jay, is convincing the courts, or the Information Commissioner’s Office, which deals with issues pertaining to the Data Protection Act, that an offence has actually been committed.

Read her full article here : Google Street View would face uk legal test