Keep our homes out of Street View, say Germans

Berlin, Sep 20: German media reported that thousands of German citizens have requested to keep their homes out of Google's Street View service.

The German weekly Der Spiegel reported that many Germans had already objected to inclusion in the Google service. Later the German government officials told that it will scrutinise Google's promise to respect privacy requests by letting people stay out of the project. They also added that those who want to be out of the service can apply till Oct 15.

Google plans to add Germany's 20 largest cities to Street View by the end of 2010, joining 23 countries already included.

Street View is a service that was aimed to power Google Maps and Google Earth with panoramic views of the Earth.

It was found out that Google had grabbed data from unsecured networks for years as its Street View cars captured images of street scenes.

The issue about gathering personal data by the Google came to light in May 2010 following a request by data protection authorities in Hamburg, Germany, for more information on Google's Street View technology.

This led to many countries' data protection authorities to press Google for access to the data it collected to see if laws protecting personal information were broken.

OneIndia News