Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!
Monday, September 14, 2009
Cross-posted from
Google Policy Blog
Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.
Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective. We're a small team of Google Chicago engineers (named after a Monty Python skit about the
Judean People's Front
) that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions. Our goal is to "liberate" data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.
What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you'd like to take it elsewhere.
At the heart of this lies our
strong commitment
to an open web run on open standards. We think open is better than closed -- not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it's easy for users to leave your product, there's a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users. When your users are locked in, there's a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.
Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once. We believe that users - not products - own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We'd rather have loyal users who use Google products because they're innovative - not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave.
We've already liberated over half of all Google products, from our popular blogging platform Blogger, to our email service Gmail, and Google developer tools including App Engine. In the upcoming months, we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export).
Feel free to take a deeper look into product liberation at
dataliberation.org
, a website we're launching today which is dedicated to explaining the Data Liberation Front and the products we've liberated.
If you'd like to contribute suggestions for services that you think need to be liberated, please do so on our Data Liberation
Moderator page
. We're also on Twitter
@dataliberation
.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager
Is the New Statesman fair?
Thursday, August 20, 2009
We woke up this morning to see the cover of
New Statesman
, a UK political magazine, carrying a lurid illustration of the devil accompanied by the question "Is Google Evil?"
Our popularity around the world means we're used to articles that scrutinise Google's role on the web. That's fair. But did the New Statesman have any evidence of evil? Far from it.
In print, The New Statesman published a response from us alongside the article. We thought we'd publish it here:
Google's aim is and always has been to help people find the
information they're looking for. It's why our services have
become so popular. They are easy to use and they work.
Take Search. People use Google Search because they trust it to help them
find what they need. We don't charge for it or force people to use it. We
don't 'lock' our users in as some technology companies do.
Search is a highly competitive field which is evolving all the
time. In just the last few months we've seen the emergence of new services like Bing, Cuil and
Wolfram Alpha. People can choose to switch to these search
engines and others with a click of a mouse. More than half of
internet users in the UK say they use more than one search engine
every week.
Similarly, there is nothing to lock advertisers into using Google's
services. Advertising rates are not set by Google, but by a
competitive auction. Advertisers determine their own bids and budgets
and can adjust them at any time. And just as users can easily switch
between search engines, advertisers can and do spend their budgets in
a variety of places. The vast majority of Google's top advertisers advertise
on other search engines and in a range of other media, both offline and online.
They'll stick with Google only if the results they achieve are worth more than they spend.
Of course, not everyone sees it like that. Some are concerned that Google
is becoming too big and worry we might misuse the data we hold.
Online privacy is an important issue and one we take very seriously. As increasing
amounts of data are uploaded to the internet every day, it becomes
ever more important for people to understand the benefits and risks involved
. Google is committed to protecting people's
privacy online by offering transparency and choice.
We're transparent about the data we collect when people sign up for our
services and we design products that give people control over the information they share.
That data helps us provide a better experience for our users, helps combat
spam and fraud, and allows us to customise content to make it more relevant
and useful.
It also allows us to use anonymised, aggregated data to give valuable insights into what people are searching for.
One such tool is Google Flu Trends. Traditional flu surveillance systems take up to a fortnight to collect and release data. By comparison, search queries can be automatically counted very quickly, and because people are likely to search for symptoms or remedies before they contact a doctor, our estimates may be able to provide a useful early-warning system for outbreaks of flu.
It is not in our interest to abuse our position or misuse your data. People continue to use Google because they trust it to work. Our focus is on providing an ever better service because that's the only thing that keeps them coming back.
Posted by Peter Barron,
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
North and Central Europe
British MP David Davis, Google, and Setting the Record Straight
Monday, July 27, 2009
We were surprised and disappointed to open the Times newspaper today and find a vitriolic
column
on Google and our record on privacy, from Conservative Member of Parliament David Davis. Responding to speculation in the Times several weeks ago that the Conservative party was in favour of giving patients the ability to transfer their medical records to private companies, Mr Davis decided to launch an extraordinary attack on Google, riddled with misleading statements. Of course, Mr Davis didn't ask us first for our comments or to check his facts before going to press.
Mr Davis' argument is based on something of a straw man, given that Google Health, our health records product, is only available in the US, and we have no immediate plans to bring it to other countries. But given that he goes on to attack our Street View product as a "high-handed" intrusion on privacy, assert that we do not respect European privacy law, argue we have entered into "an amoral deal with China," and attribute our economic success to "legally unfettered use of personal data", we wanted to set the record straight.
Allegation: Google is "hostile to privacy."
We were the first company in our industry to anonymise information when people conduct searches. We took the US government to court when we were asked to hand over large amounts of data to them. Like all of our products, Street View was built from the ground up to respect user privacy. The imagery is not real time. We automatically blur faces and vehicle number plates, and we make it easy for people with concerns to have their homes removed from Street View if they wish. In the months since Street View launched in the UK, tens of millions of people have found it a useful and interesting tool, whether for exploring a tourist destination, finding a restaurant or checking driving directions.
Allegation: Google claims that European privacy legislation "does not apply to it."
For a company that supposedly ignores European laws, we did not launch Google Street View in the UK until we had the green light from the Information Commissioner! "Google Street View does not contravene the Data Protection Act," said David Evans, the Commissioner's Senior Data Protection Practice Manager, "and, in any case, it is not in the public interest to turn the digital clock back."
Allegation: Google entered an "amoral deal" with China.
As we said
when we launched Google.cn, it wasn't a step we took lightly, but we felt we were doing it for the right reasons - to bring more information to more people. Where Chinese regulations require us to remove sensitive information from our search results we disclose this to users - which is not standard practice in China.
Allegation: Google makes its money from "exploiting its customers' private data for commercial ends."
Google makes the vast majority of its revenue by providing users with free services and serving ads targeted to what the user has searched for or has read. This does not involve selling user data or exposing it in any way. When we launched interest based advertising we did so only after putting users in control of the information collected about them, as we make clear in our
user FAQ.
In addition, we do not use categories defined by
European privacy laws
as "sensitive" such as race, religion, sexual orientation, or health when showing ads.
If managed and used responsibly, the free services Google offers can be of tremendous civic benefit. We’ve developed a tool called “Flu Trends”, which offers an early warning system for flu outbreaks based on the anonymous actions of millions of people searching for symptoms. Relief agencies depend on Google Earth images after natural disasters like tsunamis or hurricanes and Indian farmers leverage our topographical maps to help with flood management.
We're proud of our track record of protecting user privacy. We work hard to make sure our users understand what data we collect and how we use it, because we are committed to transparency and user choice. The important work of education is made more difficult by polemicists who abuse the truth. We are happy to debate our privacy record or policies anytime, but we'd rather that debate was based on fact not fiction.
Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel
Making YouTube a Safer Place
Monday, June 22, 2009
As a host for other people's content, YouTube aims to be a strong platform for free expression, while respecting individual choice and protecting young people from inappropriate content and exploitation. Over the past year, we've bolstered our efforts in four major areas: (1) developing clear policies about what is and is not acceptable on the site; (2) constructing robust mechanisms to enforce these policies; (3) rolling out innovative product features that enable safe behaviour; and (4) upping our educational efforts to increase user awareness of how to stay safe on the site.
We recently completed a tour of London, Amsterdam, and Brussels to discuss these developments with lawmakers, regulators, academics, civil liberties organizations, and journalists.
During the tour, we demonstrated how we deal with troublesome content. With 20 hours of video going up each minute on YouTube, we can't preview videos to make sure they comply with our rules. Our community steps in and does a great job flagging videos they think are inappropriate. We then conduct a thorough manual review of flagged videos.
In addition, we have put in place strong user controls. Users, for example, can filter out profane language in comments to videos with a new Filter W*rds feature. Currently available only in English, Filter W*rds allows users to replace profanity, lewd language, and racial epithets with ***. Of course, the option remains of leaving comments unfiltered or hiding them altogether by clicking on the arrow beside the "Comments" heading.
While in Europe, we announced the international launch of the YouTube Safety
Centre
. Localised in 17 languages, the Centre features straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations to help teens and their parents learn about issues such as cyberbullying, media literacy, and hateful content. The Safety Centre can be found via a link at the bottom of any YouTube page. The new Centre makes it easier for visitors to reach our
Help and Safety Tool
.
Protecting young people on the web is the shared responsibility of parents and families, educators, industry, and government. At YouTube, we are doing our part by providing education and tools, and by inviting local government, safety, and media literacy organisations to add their own content to the Safety Centre. In every community in which YouTube is launched, we welcome additional partners who can make the Safety Centre even more robust. As with every product at Google, our goal is to put our users' needs first.
Posted by Victoria Grand, Head of YouTube Policy, and Scott Rubin, Sr. Communications & Public Affairs Mgr
Street View: Exploring Europe's Streets With New Privacy Safeguards
Friday, June 12, 2009
In 2007 we began to look at bringing the highly innovative and very popular Street View to Europe, and I
highlighted
the new technological challenges this would present given different privacy laws and cultural norms. We pre-empted many of the different requirements and concerns and proactively introduced privacy enhancing technologies, namely industry-leading face and license plate blurring, and made it easy to flag inappropriate images for removal. We began a dialogue with the Article 29 Working Party, which brings together representatives from all 27 European Data Protection Authorities. In turn, they have asked us to make a few additional modifications to address local specificities to ensure Street View better aligns to local interpretations of privacy requirements across the whole of Europe.
First, they have asked us to continue to provide advance notice to the public about the project before we start driving in a new country. We already got a head start on this request earlier this year, when we worked closely with the press to announce details of when and where we would be driving in new countries such as Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, and Switzerland. As you can probably imagine, it can be tricky at times to say exactly where our cars will be and when; we're affected by lots of things outside our control such as the weather and lighting conditions, we also rely on the local knowledge of our drivers to decide which places it is best to drive when, taking into account traffic conditions and other local factors. Nonetheless, we are committed to working within the Article 29 Working Party's guidelines on this issue.
Second, the Article 29 Working Party has asked that we set a time limit on how long we keep the unblurred copies of panoramas from Street View, in a way that appropriately balances the use of this data for legitimate purposes with the need to deal with any potential concerns from individuals who might feature incidentally on the Street View imagery. To explain the issue here, although the images you see on Street View have faces and car license plates blurred out, we have to collect an original 'unblurred' copy of that image first. We then apply our highly sophisticated blurring technology and we make sure that only the blurred copy is ever made public.
The Article 29 Working Party have, however, asked us to take some additional steps to ensure that we don't keep the original 'unblurred' copy for longer than we need to. This is a challenge, but again one we're committed to meeting not just in Europe but globally. One of the technical challenges at stake with Street View--or any service that uses image detector software --is that the software sometimes makes mistakes, labeling part of the image as containing a face or a license plate when in fact it doesn't. While we like to think we've gotten pretty good at this stuff, we still have lots of these 'false positives'.
Some of these can be pretty funny like the blurred horse shown above, but this also affects the quality of Google Maps and so in turn affects our users - for example, it'd be pretty annoying if you couldn't find the phone number of that little deli across town where you think you might have left your purse, because our software mistook the phone number for a license plate. That's why we're constantly working on ways to improve our technology, and we are constantly training it to detect more of the relevant stuff, while reducing the number of 'false positives' it creates. To do this, though, we need access to the original unblurred copies of the images. Nevertheless, we've communicated to the Article 29 Working Party that we will meet their request that long term we only keep the blurred copy of Street View panoramas, and we will work with them and our engineers to determine the shortest retention period that also allows for legitimate use under EU laws.
It's important for companies operating services across Europe to be able to follow harmonised data protection guidance, and we're grateful to the Article 29 Working Party for their advice and collaboration on Street View. It is this coordinated approach that will best enable the expansion of consumer-facing services and innovative technology across the region. Street View has proven to be extremely popular in the countries in which it has
launched
and with these additional privacy safeguards we plan to bring it to even more countries in the European Union, allowing people to explore their home towns, tourist attractions or cities on the other side of the world. We are already receiving many requests to come drive new areas so that imagery can be used to showcase a town, promote tourism and improve travel planning and we are of course always happy to consider these.
Read about
our latest addition to Street View - tourists and Mickey Mouse fans can now virtually explore the Disneyland parks in Paris.
Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel
What We've Learned Rolling Out Street View Around The Globe
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Street View on Google Maps is one of our most popular and fastest-growing products, but it's still a new technology that we're continuing to evolve. We've progressed a long way since the early prototypes collected their first imagery in 2007 and while rolling out Street View around the world we've learned that no two streets are the same.
New countries bring new challenges all the time -- be it the English weather, the darker winters of Northern Europe or even the sensitivities of a red light district. To give just one example, when we first started collecting imagery for Street View in the U.S. we realised that our cars wouldn't capture some of Europe's greatest landmarks which can be found down narrow streets or cobblestone paths. So we built a bicycle system that can tackle sights like Pompei or the Trevi Fountain.
And then there's privacy. We've learned a lot about what people are comfortable with in different parts of the world and we have worked hard to listen to their concerns and make adjustments where necessary. Before launching Street View imagery in a new country, we reach out to the Data Protection Authority to explain what the product is and how our privacy protection tools work, discussing our built-in features like
license blurring
and the ability to flag inappropriate images for
removal
.
We have also been in constructive dialogue and exchanged written information with the Article 29 Working Party which brings together representatives from all 27 European Data Protection Authorities. The Working Party has asked us to make a few modifications to ensure that Street View better aligns to local interpretations of European privacy requirements. For example, they asked us to take steps to notify the public in advance of when we're driving. As you can probably imagine, this can be a bit tricky due to ever-changing weather and lighting conditions, but we are committed to working within their guidelines. In fact, we had already got a head start on this request when we announced the beginning of driving in countries such as Poland, Czech Republic and Switzerland.
As with many cutting-edge technologies, the challenge we face with Street View is striking the right balance between building a sophisticated and highly useful tool while ensuring that the data we collect to provide these services is used appropriately. Street View has once again underlined the mantra our founders have repeated since the early days of Google: listen to users, take their feedback, and iterate. The many people across Europe who already use Street View to explore their home towns, tourist attractions or cities on the other side of the world, suggest that this approach is welcomed. We look forward to bringing these benefits to many more Google Maps users in the months to come.
Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Chief Cartographer, EMEA
If It Isn't Open, It Isn't The Internet.
Friday, April 24, 2009
We were proud to host a celebrity this week in Brussels -- Dr. Vinton G. Cerf. Vint holds one of the great job titles ever invented, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for our company. Vint is best known as a "Father of the Internet," the co-designer of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet.
At the
Open Forum Europe
summit "The Future is Open" today, Vint gave the keynote address. He explained that the conscious choice to design an open and neutral Internet turned out to be the main ingredient for its tremendous success. If the Net stays open, he predicted that it will help us getting out of the present economic gloom by unleashing creative ideas and helping create successful businesses, small and large, in Europe and elsewhere. Before Vint took to the podium,
Professor Ziga Turk
had explained how the first communication revolution - cheap paper from China - empowered the masses and helped unleash the Renaissance's creativity, and how the Internet is provoking a second communication revolution by spreading knowledge across the globe. Vint took up the train of thought and offered an analogy to the French Revolutionary goals of
liberté, egalité
and
fraternité
, saying openness, open standards, and open source must be the three guiding principles for the Net to achieve this revolutionary promise.
The most timely element of Vint's talk concerns open and non-discriminatory network access, commonly called net neutrality. While the European Union is close to a deal on European Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding's electronic communications package, it so far has failed to reach agreement on a provision ensuring that the ones controlling the physical layer do not favour their own or affiliated content or services at the application layer of the Internet. Vint acknowledged that telecom operators should have the necessary flexibility to manage traffic on their networks to keep them functioning in a smooth and secure fashion. Also, Vint acknowledged that an effective way of ensuring fairness in resource allocation is to charge more for faster than slower data transfer rates. This will help avoid congestion.
But it is crucial to ensure that flexibility does not lead to abuse. As "Skype Evangelist" Sten Tamkivi
pointed out
at the same conference: competition law and transparency may provide certain safeguards - but chances are this won't be enough, especially not for start-ups. A recent consumer survey that Google helped commission, showed that an overwhelming 91% of consumers in the UK, France and Germany expect their Internet Service Provider to avoid blocking or limiting their service. We have joined with a group of Internet companies including France's Dailymotion and PriceMinister, as well as Yahoo, eBay, Skype and Amazon, in favor of maintaining an open Internet. Together with them, we have signed a position paper
urging the EU legislator to avoid eroding end-users rights to access the content, applications and services they choose.
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, traditional or unconventional – can compete on equal terms to serve users. Those providing the highway shouldn't be able to decide who gets to drive in the fast lane. As Vint said, "the Internet must stay open. That’s where new ideas come from. That’s where new entrepreneurs come from. That’s what creates new jobs, new wealth, new knowledge. The openness of the network is going to be the engine to create new wealth. If we do anything to hurt that, we will do untold damage."
Posted by Sebastian Müller, European Policy Manager, Brussels
Gmail Turns Five
Friday, April 3, 2009
This week, Gmail celebrated its 5th birthday with the international launch of Gmail Labs, a quirky experimental feature playground. To mark the occasion, we held a press conference in Brussels to talk about how Gmail has evolved from its beginnings as a straightforward email service to the robust and flexible communications product we offer users today. Here's a quick recap of the event for all of those who attended by about 40 journalists.
Our Director of Product Management Eric Tholome put Gmail in context by giving a short history of computing, noting how we moved from the mainframe to personal computers, and from being disconnected to becoming a part of a network via the Internet. Using the power of the Web, many applications today including email, calendars, and online photo albums now can be run from within a browser over the Internet, or "in the cloud." This transformation is analogous to the creation of the electric grid a century ago. Before, everyone owned their own electricity generator. Now that seems inefficient and unnecessary.
Working in the cloud also eliminates the annoyance of manually keeping software up-to-date. Instead of relying on each individual to upgrade his or her software, a web-based application receives new features, security patches, and general updates from the server-side. Users can stop worrying about running updates: they will always see the newest version. Gmail, a web-based service, is a good example. Hundreds of changes have been launched since 2004, and users simply saw the newest version every time they logged on. These new features include increased storage space, video chat, and updated interface, and more.
At the event, Product Manager Christian Miccio introduced the crowd to Gmail Labs, a set of experimental features that you can turn on to modify how your Gmail works. Initially launched in English in June, 2008, Gmail Labs has launched 43 features in 43 weeks - including features like Offline Gmail, Tasks, Mail Goggles, Undo Send, and the Forgotten Attachment Detector. Such a rapid launch schedule, Christian noted, could only happen for a cloud-based application. And now, with the launch of Gmail Labs in 47 new languages, users globally can play with these features in their local languages.
If you are unfamiliar with Gmail Labs experiments, which can be turned on and off individually with a few clicks of the mouse, take a look at the
video
below for a brief introduction.
To set up a Gmail account, just
click
and get started. To turn on Gmail Labs features, go to the Settings link in the top right, then navigate to the Labs tab within the window. f you haven't tried Gmail Labs yet, we encourage you to play around - there's a feature (or two!) for everyone.
Posted by William Echikson, Senior Manager, Communications and Kasia Chmielinski, Communications Associate
Street View and Child Safety
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Since we launched Street View last week in the UK, giving users 360 degree street level views of 25 British cities, we've been overwhelmed by the generally positive feedback and seen record-breaking numbers of users visiting the site.
Then we woke up this morning to an accusation concerning the safety of children. The Independent on Sunday published an article about our Street View cameras picking up a picture of toddlers playing in a small local park in London, one of whom appeared to be naked.
Since publication, the Independent on Sunday has agreed to correct the original story, which painted a highly misleading picture, but the article did raise serious issues about the inadvertent publication of photographs which may be inappropriate on a public platform.
The photographs in this case were not revealing. They showed a typical family picnic in a public park on a summer's day, with children playing. It's important to note that none of the images in Street View are live, they were taken last year. The child in question was some distance from the camera and could only be made out properly at the highest zoom level, meaning that the image already appeared blurred due to the low resolution. He or she was not facing the camera, so could not be identified. And where other people's faces appeared in the image our automatic blurring tool had worked well, to make sure that none of the faces could be identified.
Nevertheless, we take issues around inappropriate content in our products very seriously, and we removed the images within an hour of being notified. For us, privacy and user choice remain paramount. This is why we have put in place tools so that if people see what they believe to be inappropriate images, or simply don't want themselves, their family, their house or car to appear, they can report them to us using the simple tools and the images will be quickly removed.
At Google we are committed to protecting child safety. We support parents' efforts to educate and protect their children when they go online through policies like YouTube's Community Guidelines and easy-to-use technologies like SafeSearch. It's important for us all to be vigilant in the area of child safety, but also to keep things in perspective.
Posted by D-J Collins, Director, Communication and Public Affairs, Europe, Middle East and Africa
Street View and You
Friday, March 20, 2009
Want to cycle along the historic Amsterdam canals while sitting at your desk? Or stroll down chic Old Bond Street? This is now possible thanks to Google Street View, which launched yesterday in the UK and the Netherlands. Street View is a feature of Google Maps that allows people to explore and navigate a neighbourhood visually, through panoramic street-level photographs. It's proved very popular wherever it's been launched around the world, from the Australian Outback to the Champs Elysees.
We've been overwhelmed with positive feedback from people who have used Street View to check out a holiday destination or reconnect with somewhere they used to live. At the same time, we've seen some misunderstandings and exaggerations about the product: are Street View images spying on people? How do we protect an individual's privacy? Is this a new tool for burglars?
Firstly, imagery for Street View is created as our cars drive along public roads and take pictures from cameras mounted on their rooftops. The coverage you see on Street View isn't real-time.
Secondly, when taking images for Street View it is inevitable that we also capture some images of people who happen to be walking by. Not only are these images not real-time, but we've also developed state-of-the-art face blurring and licence plate blurring technologies, so there shouldn’t be identifiable faces or licence plates in our imagery. As a contingency, in the event that blurring software may not work perfectly, we created a simple process for anyone to contact us to have their image removed. Likewise, users can flag--and we will remove--any images that are inappropriate. Since launching yesterday in The UK and The Netherlands, we have received very few removal requests. Where removals or further blurring have been requested, in the majority of cases images have been removed within hours.
In most countries where we already have launched Street View--Australia and France, for example -- privacy regulators have recognized our efforts. In the UK, we were pleased but not surprised to gain the approval of the Information Commissioner's Office when we started collecting imagery. "We are satisfied that Google is putting in place adequate safeguards to avoid any risk to the privacy or safety of individuals, including the blurring of vehicle registration marks and the faces of anyone included in Street View images," the Commissioner's Office said.
Then there's the question about whether Street View allows burglars to research potential targets more easily. The imagery available on Street View is no different from what people can see when walking down the street themselves or when viewing images which are already widely available on a number of real estate and directory sites. Saying that Street View is enabling crime is like blaming the motor industry for crime because criminals also use getaway cars.
In fact, when we spoke to the Metropolitan Police in the UK, they told us that they have seen no evidence that Street View could lead to a rise in crime. Indeed they believe that mapping can be useful in raising awareness locally about crime and helping people take action to prevent it. This backs up what we have heard from other countries where we have launched Street View. For example, police officers in America used Street View to find the location of a kidnapped child and Australian police to show the location of a crime and appeal for witnesses.
We work with a strong belief that knowledge is good and that everybody should have access to it. Europeans realize that they will benefit from this new digital world only if the right balance is struck between individual privacy and empowering people to obtain access to information about the world around them. We think we've struck a balance with Street View, but why not take a look and find out for yourself.
Posted by Gavin McGinty, Product Counsel
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Archive
2016
Sep
Introducing YouTube Creators for Change
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Juncker embraces creators -- and their concerns
Tour 10 Downing Street with Google Arts and Culture
European copyright: there's a better way
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