Google has for some time provided a popular map feature which is accessible from its home page. Recently in the UK, Google has augmented this service by using customized vehicles to photograph most public streets in the UK’s major towns and cities, to produce what they call “Google Street View”. Street View allows one to see literally what any given place looks like as though one were standing on the street.
Google’s camera cars have recorded streets adding up to a distance of more than 22,000 miles in this country alone. With the release of Street View in this country, a few people have announced that they feel that the creation of such a permanent record is a infringement of people’s privacy. Some have gone further and suggested that it constitutes a breach of the country’s data protection laws. Indeed, the Information Commissioners’ office has now been called upon by one group, Privacy International, to take action against Google under the Data Protection Act.
In reality, Privacy International are almost a year late. Google’s street view received the blessing of the Information Commission in July last year on the basis that it had in place adequate safeguards to protect people’s privacy. The Information Commission referred to those safeguards as including “the blurring of vehicle registration marks and the faces of anyone included in the street view images”. The idea being that those safeguards would make it very difficult to identify anyone that happens to have been captured by Google’s street view cars. Google has also agreed that in circumstances where someone has been captured, a strict and expeditious take down procedure should be put in place so that such people are able to call for the removal of those particular images.
The sets of rights in question would be those rights enshrined within either, the UK Data Protection Act, or the European Convention of Human Rights, which under Article 8 provides everybody with a right to enjoy a private life.
The Data Protection Act concerns the collection and protection of personal data. The question is whether or not taking a photograph of a street, where the subject matter of the photo is the street itself, is something that should be protected by the Data Protection Act? Google proceeded only after receiving the blessing of the Information Commission, who had confirmed that the safeguards that they had put in place were adequate.
With regards to Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, the right that is enshrined therein is that people should be provided with a right to lead a private life. Recently there has been a move by the courts to interpret this Article of the Humans Right Act in a way that has expanded the popular expectation of privacy. However, to infer from this Act that merely taking a photo of a public street, (where the subject matter is not the incidental persons upon that street but the street itself) constitutes an invasion of their privacy, would be to take that interpretation of the Act much further, and arguably an untenable step too far.
There is also another article enshrined within the Human Rights Act which is Article 10, which enshrines each person’s right to freedom of expression. When balancing the interplay between these two articles, the courts will have in mind the relative harm and utility that any given act will have. In this particular case, since Google’s street view is of such particular utility, not just to the people within the city that is photographed but to everyone, around the world, now able to see what any given city looks like in detail, it would not be surprising if they were to conclude that such utility is greater than any invasion of privacy.
- Richard Dickinson and Alex Watt
