Google Street View and Privacy

The Google Street View technology has proven to be highly controversial. Especially in a lot of European countries – where privacy and data protection laws are far stricter than e.g. in the United States – the launch of Street View has caused many residents and citizens to issues complaints to government officials about the project thereby claiming that it is a massive intrusion upon privacy and thus a violation of existing data privacy laws. It is the aim of this paper to contribute to a better understanding of this technology and its problems by discussing it from a philosophical and engineering point of view. Existing methods for preserving privacy are criticized. Improved methods are proposed thereby also showing that Google Street View could be regarded as a kind of interstage product which should have never reached the public.