Controversy has swirled around the house-by-house photographs in Germany where critics even claim they might enable burglars to analyse the locks on house doors online before they stage break-ins.<\/p>\n
Google plans to put its album of photos of Germany online this year.<\/p>\n
Kay Overbeck, chief spokesman for Google Germany, said the US company was working with German government privacy commissioners to resolve the objections.<\/p>\n
“Fundamentally, Street View is legal,” he told a news conference at the CeBIT electronics trade fair in the German city of Hanover.<\/p>\n
Although the company is not an exhibitor at CeBIT, it rented space there to stage a tongue-in-cheek graffiti attack on three of its own camera cars, which have crawled the kerbs of Europe taking pictures of building facades.<\/p>\n
Art students smeared a palette of bright colours over the clean black cars, drawing blobs and figures on them. A Google executive said the colour attack, which was inspired by the multi-coloured Google logo, was a piece of fun “rebranding” by the unconventional company.<\/p>\n
A series of German politicians have claimed the photos, which have been taken over the past year and a half but are still not public, will be threat to the privacy of German homes.<\/p>\n
Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Germans to tell Google in advance not to photograph their homes if they are worried about privacy.<\/p>\n
Overbeck said a “four-digit” number of Germans had filed such objections in recent months.<\/p>\n
He said Google would take down pictures regardless of whether it was the tenant or the freeholder who complained.<\/p>\n
He denied a claim by German Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner that the pictures would disclose the locking system on a door and become a security risk. He said the images were far too grainy for a lock to be clearly visible.<\/p>\n
Overbeck also rejected claims that it was illegal to export the raw photos from Germany.<\/p>\n
He said Google had submitted to the same “safe harbour” agreement that applies to banks, meaning it abides by German privacy legislation even when German data is stored in another nation.<\/p>\n
Michael Jones, chief technology advocate at Google, told reporters Google had never encountered before such objections as it faced in Germany and Switzerland, but was negotiating solutions.<\/p>\n
“We don’t think we are in a battle with the privacy people,” he said. “We don’t agree with everything they say, but we are working with them.”<\/p>\n
CeBIT, which runs from Tuesday to Saturday, is a show of software and computer parts with about 4,150 exhibitors this year.<\/p>\n