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Google's Street View Meets Resistance In France
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat May 10, 2008 12:34 AM
from the not-surrendering dept.
from the not-surrendering dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Google has begun to scan the streets of Paris as part of its Street View service, but the company may be hindered from publishing them unedited. The reason? French privacy laws. Google may be forced to blur faces or use low-resolution versions of the photographs. The Embassy of France in the US has a page devoted to French privacy laws, that says the laws are needed to 'avoid infringing the individual's right to privacy and right to his or her picture (photograph or drawing), both of them rights of personality.'"
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Your Rights Online: Google Begins Blurring Faces In Street View 170 comments
mytrip notes a News.com article reporting that Google has begun blurring faces in its Street View service, which has spawned privacy concerns since its introduction last year. Google has been working for a couple of years to advance the state of the art of face recognition. Quoting News.com: 'The technology uses a computer algorithm to scour Google's image database for faces, then blurs them, said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps, in an interview at the Where 2.0 conference...' Google wrote about the program in their Lat/Long blog."
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When in Rome... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When in Rome... (Score:5, Funny)
brain... hurt...
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Re:When in Rome... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:When in Rome... (Score:5, Funny)
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that may not mean what you think (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but that may not mean what you think it means.
French laws apparently are restrictions on publishing, not taking, pictures. So, Google can legally take those pictures, and legally take them out of French jurisdiction. And since they are not subject to French laws in the US, they can publish them in the US unedited. Google would seem to be in full compliance with all local laws at all times.
They do it in China, with their censored Google, s
Re:that may not mean what you think (Score:5, Informative)
2. By taking, recording or transmitting, without his or her consent, the picture of a person who is in a private place.
When you take pictures on the street of somebody in a window of their house that is considered private. Google does that and hence is violating the law.
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Compare vs. Britain ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Before people jump all over me about the diffences, yes, I realize that this is apples-to-oranges. There are lots of differences in how and why the laws are written, and a big difference between law enforcement cameras (presumably not for public distribution or corporate profit), and Google cameras, etc etc etc.
What surprises me is that two societies with such close physical, economic, historic (+/- ad infinitum) ties have such radically different expectations of control over personal images taken in public.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let say that you take a picture of a street full of apartments. (This is the case in Paris) And in one of those shots you happen to take there is a woman changing. Yes the shot is inadvertent, but it is invasion of privacy because the angle of the shot happens to include both the street and the woman.
As the article said:
2. By taking, recording or transmitting, without his or her consent, the picture of a person who is in a private place.
When you are on the
Re:When in Rome... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:When in Rome... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:When in Rome... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:When in Rome... (Score:4, Insightful)
Perfect! - So when I as a swede set up the new Piratebay in new York I only has to worry about swedish laws? - Grrrrrrreat!
Come on, you follow the laws in the country you're in - it's that easy.
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Re:When in Rome... (Score:5, Funny)
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Ask Yahoo if they need to obey local laws (Score:5, Informative)
They lost in the French Nazi auction case [cnn.com], which established the precedent that even big American Internet companies have to abide by national laws. The excuse that the Internet is some sort of separate place, or that national laws have no clout in the Internet Age died right then and there, in 2000.
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The whole Street View idea... (Score:4, Informative)
Personally, I just don't see the overwhelming need for it. I've never really needed to see what a road or a street looks like before driving on it. The only case that springs to mind is for odd places way out in remote areas, where there the lay-out may be different... but that's exactly the sort of place that would never get put into the StreetView system anyway.
So, does anyone find StreetView genuinely useful enough to be worth all the privacy hassle?
Re:The whole Street View idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
StreetView has its purpose, it's really a matter of how follow directions.
Also, I've been using it for house hunting in the city I live in. I'm able to see what kind of homes are in the different neighborhoods around town without driving all over the place. Once I find some neighborhoods that I like I drive there myself just to get a feel for the area in person.
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So, does anyone find StreetView genuinely useful enough to be worth all the privacy hassle?
I would/will find it useful if/when it covers German cities. I'm not a native of this country (or Europe, or even the Northern Hemisphere for that matter) and sometimes a map just isn't enough. The satellite view on Google Maps is handy, but still not quite good enough, since rooftops can look quite different to the view from below.
The problem comes when I have a hard time identifying something that I see with my own eyes as being a street or not. That's a lot more common than you'd think here! Espec
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Not resistance, but law! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not resistance, it is the french law.
As a French citizen, I find the Slashdot title offensive.
Paris is the capital of a free sovereign country, France, which has its own Constitution and legal system, which is not the US ones!
The title implies that american law should prevail everywhere! No! France is not a US colony.
I am sure that most american (& french) citizens would expect French coorporations (e.g. Thales, Air Liquide,
Why should it be different for Google (an american coorporation) in France?
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Re:Not resistance, but law! (Score:4, Insightful)
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California has a similar law (Score:5, Interesting)
California has a similar law, Civil Code section 3344 [findlaw.com]. This covers "publicity rights". Each person's "publicity right" in recognizable images of themself is by law worth at least $750, if used in any manner related to advertising or selling. If you're famous, the price goes up, to cover "actual damages".
So if you're in California and recognizable in Google StreetView, you could put in a claim. It's not worth it unless you're a major celebrity.
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The online French Yellow Pages has street photos (Score:4, Interesting)
Photography in France (Score:2)
There are over 5000 infringing photographs of people in France on Corbis if you search for 'crowd france'.
http://www.corbis.com/ [corbis.com]
Re:Photography in France (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't you remember the Australian Virgin mobile fiasco ? They had taken pictures from Flickr under the Creative Common license for their advertising campaign. So far, so good. However, they did not have the consent of the people on the pictures.
Now, the family of the girl on the picture got a little wild and sued both Virgin and Creative Commons. The latter case has been dropped, but I believe the former is still ongoing.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not aware of the specific laws in France, it just seems to me that these picture agencies would have thoroughly investigated that before selling pictures of people
"Providing those details would be inappropriate" (Score:5, Informative)
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Rights of Personality (Score:4, Insightful)
The trend, and the goal, is to be able to read more people, at greater distance. We don't know how far this technology can go, but some of the things already being tested are capable enough to give one pause. If you are not allowed to think unauthorized thoughts (to question the state; to remember a song without paying royalties), do you have a personality? Do you have free will? It seems to me that at that point, consciousness would be a curse.
Gene Wolfe wrote, I believe in Soldier of the Mist, that "A man without a sword is a slave." I would contend that today it's more relevant to say that a man without privacy is a prisoner; a man without private thoughts is a slave.
It's nice to know that some places still maintain the concept of a right to privacy.
Don't trust that (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Easily contourné (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's a cool thing to be able to browse the streets of a city in 3D, but honestly, who wants their faces, car plates, etc. published for all to see? Not everybody. And until it's everybody then we should assume nobody except with express consent.
It's a matter of common decency, not just law. I hate it when people talk as though the law is the only thing we should pay any attention to.
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How about getting a permit to get authorities to temporarily (say 10 minutes at most) block off certain streets to take pictures of the streets at every location desirable. I can't imagine it would take much longer. Benefits? People who inevitably meander into the pictures most likely want to be in the picture and don't really have much of a right to compl
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I didn't notice the car go by at the time.
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The best solution is to run the project, using as many cameras/cars possible, during the month of August - this town is dead then. Save of course for the 'touristy' areas - whose numbers (especially during that month) co
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about getting a permit to get authorities to temporarily (say 10 minutes at most) block off certain streets to take pictures of the streets at every location desirable. I can't imagine it would take much longer. Benefits? People who inevitably meander into the pictures most likely want to be in the picture and don't really have much of a right to complain. They were warned (by signs, guards, etc.) and they got in (conversely, egomaniacs might not see it as a bad thing to have their faces on Google Maps). Disadvantages? Possibly slowing business down a bit, but it would be a one time thing and I imagine the benefit to small, relatively undiscovered businesses would be enormous. A small B&B with references on Google Maps would boost sales as I know a lot of people that consult TripAdvisor reviews (supplements that appear to the Google Maps images) to decide where to go during vacation trips or even routine business trips.
France has 370,000 km of roads, not counting motorways. Even if you only did this in cities the cost would be enormous and it would inevitable cause huge disruption. To avoid creating massive traffic problems you wouldn't be able to block off nearby streets one after another, the most efficient way, so the process would have to be drawn out over a reasonable period of time. Compare this to the current system - a car drives down the road - and you can see that the cost increase would be huge. Plus the benef
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Re:Easily contourné (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand this French law thing. Let me see if I can get it straight...
If I'm walking down a public street in Paris, I assume I'm allowed to look at other people, and be looked at by other people. If I have a camera with me I assume I'm allowed to take pictures, as I do not, and no one else, has any expectation of privacy. You're on a public street.
Now if I publish those photos, given that any person viewing the images could have just as well been there at the scene at the time I took the images and seen it for themselves without violating anyone's privacy, I assume that there's no violation of privacy there either.
Thus we find ourselves in Google's situation. So what is the privacy problem here?
If they were to pick a person at random and use that person in advertising in a way that made it seem the person was endorsing something, then that shouldn't really be allowed unless the person actually does endorse the product and agreed to be represented as such. But that's not happening here.
If the person had some reasonable expectation of privacy, such as walking around a gym locker room in the buff, or in a public restroom, or in their own home or on private property not viewable from a public area, that would be different. Doesn't seem like that's happening here either.
Where is the big ethical problem here? I just don't see it.
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Re:Easily contourné (Score:4, Informative)
You don't actually have permission to take photos of any faces in public. It's the same law in other countries. People have to consent to having their picture taken. Of course there is spillage and people unwittingly enter millions of tourist happy-snaps.
But if I take photos with identifiable faces and publish them on my blog or website or whatever, the people who own the faces can claim offense if I didn't ask them first.
The big ethical problem is that if there aren't these controls on how your photo/voice/identity is used, then people get exploited.
In many countries, you are not even permitted to photograph the front lawn of someone's private residence, even though it is the 'public face' of his home. Not everybody wants their stuff photographed, thank you very much.
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Re:Easily contourné (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit.
The big ethical problem is that if there aren't these controls on how your photo/voice/identity is used, then people get exploited.
The only "ethical problem" is if nitwits want to restrict the public's right to document public events in public places. That's a threat to our democracy, not because people are desperate to document your bad hair day or lack of style, but because those restrictions could be used by individuals and corporations to prevent the release of embarrassing but information of public interest on them.
In many countries, you are not even permitted to photograph the front lawn of someone's private residence, even though it is the 'public face' of his home.
Well, that may be the case in North Korea, but I can't think of any democracies where that's the case.
Not everybody wants their stuff photographed, thank you very much.
If you are in a public place in a country that doesn't specifically prohibit it, you're fair game to be photographed and published on the web; I don't give a damn if you want to or not. And if there is a compelling interest to photograph you, I'll do so even in countries where there are laws against it.
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Re:Easily contourné (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a few of links explaining the situation in the UK, Australia and US for photography of people in public places :
UK [sirimo.co.uk]
US [krages.com]
Australia [4020.net]
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There is also a fair possibility that photographs of people may be subject to the Data Protection Act, which controls the âoeprocessingâ of âoepersonal dataâ, that is, data relating to an individual from which the individual can be identiïed. The deïnitions of these terms are complex, but taking a photograph of a recognisable person would appear to ït within them. The Act contains an exception for processing undertaken with a view to publication of
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Taking photographs of a person in a public place would not normally be regarded as an invasion of privacy.
So photographs in the street are not illegal. What would be illegal would be entering private property or taking photos of people in a situation where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy (in their back garden, inside their house, etc). Google doesn't use telephoto lenses - I suppose it's conceivable they could be asked to remove a picture of the interior of someone's property from the street (if such a thing ended up on Goog
Re:Easily contourné (Score:5, Insightful)
IE - USA! USA! USA! We'll do whatever we want, only when it suits us.
Those days are over, mon ami.
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