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Privacy Invasion Discussion about Google Street View in Germany and the EU Ignores the Fact that the Government Already Spies on Citizens from the Air

By Andis Kaulins

The Google Street View privacy invasion discussion in Germany and the European Union is in some cases being conducted in a vacuum of facts. We think that most commentators would be more moderate in their opinions about Google Street View in the EU if they knew what photographic and GSP material was ALREADY available about every location, prior to Google.

Via Henrik Wild at his Sightwalk Twitter site, we are directed to a German-language website that carries an August 23, 2010 article by Margret Kiosz of SHZ (Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag) that we will explain here in English. That article is "Street View"-Alternativen : Beschattung von oben (Street View Alternatives : Spying from the Air).

In her article Kiosz informs us that while Google Street View often presents only a simple aerial view of a particular location, the Deutsche Telekom (literally "German Telecom") via its webservice telephone information page telefonbuch.de under the menu items "Karte/Luftbild/Vogelperspektive" [map, aerial, bird's eye view] for a particular address and telephone number -- already offers to anyone, customizable variable aerial views of greater sophistication and detail than Google thus far offers. The German government is involved indirectly here by the way, since Deutsche Telekom was privatized in 1996, but the company is still about 1/3 owned by the State.

The aerial imagery in Germany does not stop there. For example, as Kiosz writes, in the German State of Schleswig-Holstein (Kiel is the capital city), the government takes detailed aerial photographs of one-fifth of the State every year and uses these for multiple government purposes, including determination of buildings and construction on a given property, land survey, various environmental parameters, etc. For example, lasers even measure rooftops to determine the suitability of each roof for solar panels.

ALL of this highly detailed geodata is available for purchase for commercial use and in 2007 the 2 DVDs containing all the GPS data for every building in the State could be purchased for about ?140000.

The entire misguided discussion about the danger to individual privacy that Google Street View allegedly could present is simply largely a "non-issue" created out of thin air by the uninformed. Anyone wishing to obtain detailed GPS information and photographs of a given location was able to do so long before Google's Street View -- for a price.

Full post as published by LawPundit on August 24, 2010 (boomark / email).