By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN of nytimes
BERLIN : Google’s plan to offer Street View photo mapping in Germany, which has bumped up against the country’s strict privacy laws, has come in for renewed criticism after regulators learned that the company, a search engine giant, was also archiving the locations of household wireless networks.
Google’s Street View technology has been accepted in countries like Britain and France, but has encountered greater resistance in Germany and Switzerland, where data privacy laws are stricter than in the rest of Europe or in the United States.
German data protection officials had initially questioned the legality of Street View but dropped their objections last July after Google agreed to hide details of faces, license plates and house numbersthrough pixilation, and to give citizens the option of removing their property entirely from the 360-degree photo archive. Since then, hundreds have made such requests.
Google intends to activate the service in Germany by the end of the year.
But the controversy resurfaced last week, when data protection regulators in several German states said they were surprised to learn that Google was also recording the location of wireless routers with its roving cameras and antennas.
Routers for W.L.A.N.’s, or wireless local area networks, provide wireless Internet in homes and businesses. Each broadcasts a unique identification number, a so-called MAC address, and a device name chosen by its owner.
Germany’s data protection administrator, Peter Schaar, asked Google to end the practice immediately. But Google has continued to collect the data.
Kay Overbeck, a Google spokesman in Hamburg, said W.L.A.N. data were in the public domain in Germany. “What we are doing is totally legal and is being done by other companies around the world and in Germany,” he said.
Google has compiled similar archives around the world, Mr. Overbeck said, and has never made a secret of its project. Other organizations routinely collate such information, like Skyhook in the United States and Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, he said.
The project is designed to promote services like location-based advertising for mobile phones, which can sometime be pinpointed via a W.L.A.N. network even if they lack a GPS satellite receiver. Google has no plans to publish its archive or to link W.L.A.N. devices to individual users, Mr. Overbeck said.
“We did not mention the W.L.A.N. project during our discussions with data protection officials because it is not related to Street View,” Mr. Overbeck said.
But some officials say they feel they were misled.
“The question is what will Google do with this information?” said Johannes Caspar, the head of data protection in Hamburg, the city-state where Google has its German headquarters. “How are they going to use it?” He added, “That is what we want to find out.”
Mr. Caspar, who is leading the German government’s discussions with Google, said he planned to meet with company representatives next week, when he would inspect one of the cars the company uses to transport its mounted cameras. He said it was too early to say whether Google was violating any regulations or whether any fines or penalties could be levied.
Henrik Wild, the owner and managing director of Sightwalk, a competitor to Street View, based in Cologne, that offers similar 360-degree panoramas along major streets in seven German cities, called the dispute “exaggerated.”
“There are certainly some political leaders trying to make headlines by going after Google, but in general, many of the people I have dealt with, such as businessmen and younger people, see advantages in this kind of technology,” Mr. Wild said.
Still, an elected official in Hamburg, Till Steffen, the senator for justice, said he planned to introduce a bill in the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German Parliament, next Friday that would impose fines of €50,000, or $66,000, against Google for every instance where it had failed to eliminate the data of citizens who had opted out of Street View.
“We cannot rely on the good will of Google,” Mr. Steffen said. “For the filming of people and property, we have to have a law that is legally binding.”
Mr. Overbeck, the Google spokesman, said the company saw no threat to its business in Germany if the legislation with the new penalties were to become law.
“He is essentially trying to formalize what we already agreed to do last year with the country’s data protection officials,” he said.
Google scored a related victory Thursday when Germany’s Supreme Court dismissed an artist’s claim that Google’s photo search function, which had displayed thumbnail photos of some paintings from her Internet site, had violated her copyright. The court ruled that the artist, by voluntarily displaying her paintings on her Internet site, must take responsibility for how they are displayed by search engines.
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