The real world continues to push back against Google’s virtual Street View. On Tuesday, South Korean police raided the company’s offices as they investigated whether the search giant illegally collected personal wireless information. And in Germany, government officials criticized Google’s plan to give a four-week deadline for property owners to make their buildings invisible in Street View.
Google had said it would start Street View in the 20 biggest German cities by the end of 2010, and it recently announced that, beginning next week, owners of properties in those cities could use an online tool for four weeks to hide their buildings.
‘Surprised Me Very Much’
But that was news to Johannes Caspar, who oversees data protection in Hamburg. He issued a statement that Google’s announcement “surprised me very much,” adding that the company’s decision to start the deadline clock during the summer holidays and its refusal to add a complaints hotline “create doubts about Google’s interests in a simple and user-friendly implementation.”
Peter Schaar of the German Federal Commission for Data Protection posted on his blog Tuesday that people should be able to make objections about photos of their property “at all times,” and Google should make sure all complaints have been dealt with before it begins Street View in that country.
In South Korea, the government is investigating whether Google’s Street View cars, which have been capturing photos of neighborhoods before the service’s launch there, illegally acquired personal data. “We will investigate Google Korea officials and scrutinize the data we confiscated today,” the Korean National Policy Agency’s Cyber Terror Response Center said in statement.
The actions by the two countries are only the most recent in a series of government responses to Google’s service. The Street View controversy stems from the collection of private wireless data by Google’s vehicles, which have ridden down…