Legal Challenges
Analysts map Google Street View's legal challenges
Mapping service faces 28 actions, from every continent except the Antarctic.
Nearly half of the 60 worldwide legal or criminal investigations faced by Google relate to the company's Street View service. It is facing around 28 actions against the mapping service, 11 from inside the US.
Although the information commissioner last week lifted some of the heat on Google's suspected breach of the Data Protection Act in the UK, the search giant still faces lawsuits or criminal investigations in every continent except the Antarctic. Its products have been the subject of bans or threatened bans in at least 23 countries, and Google faces 33 lawsuits in the US alone, according to new estimates by the analysts Aqute Intelligence.
Street View, which shows 360-degree views of towns and cities, kept Google's lawyers particularly busy in the first half of this year. In May, Google admitted that its Street View cars had picked up approximately 600 gigabytes of personal data from Wi-Fi connections while mapping homes in more than 30 nations. Cue litigations from internet service providers, private companies and aggrieved citizens.
Some of those aggrieved object to pictures of their home being made public, while others take umbrage over Google's apparently inadvertent collection of personal data. All actions boil down to an individual's right to privacy – and what information requires prior consent before being made publicly accessible. Of the 60 litigations faced by Google worldwide, 28 pertain to Street View: 11 in the US, 14 in Europe, two in Australasia and one in Asia. And Google's YouTube has been banned or threatened with a ban in 19 countries. A regional court in Russia last week became the latest authority to block access to it – a single hosted video was deemed "extremist" and a regional ban on the website was ordered. Google, in response, said the ruling violated the country's constitutional right to freedom of information. The internet rights group, Internet Technologies Association, recently launched a legal protest against a two-year-old ban on the website in Turkey, citing fundamental freedom of expression. Proxy servers used to circumvent the government ban keep YouTube a regular fixture in Turkey's top 10 most-visited websites.
A map from which these figures come was put together by Aqute Intelligence. Since going live in early July, the map has had more than 62,000 views – a significant proportion of those are likely to be from privacy advocates, lawyers and pressure groups. James MacAonghus, the research director at Aqute, says: "The point we're trying to make is that as Google gets more powerful, it's coming up against more legislation and they've got loads of balls to juggle at the same time. We'll update on a regular basis as long as the issues keep arising."
(Published by The Guardian – August 2, 2010)