Google Refuses to Manually Blur Swiss Street View

Google on Thursday asked a Swiss court to lift a privacy-related ban that has prevented it from updating Street View photos for more than a year, according to reports.

Street View launched in Switzerland in August 2009. In November Switzerland's privacy watchdog, Hanspeter Thuer, demanded Google guarantee every face and license plate is properly blurred in Street View, a service that lets people see street-level, 360-degree photos. Since then, Google has been under a Swiss court order not to upload any new Swiss photos to Street View until the court makes a final ruling, which is expected in two or three months, according to the Seattle Times.

"Our central request is this: You can't simply leave it to a machine to blur faces. This has to be supervised by a person," Thuer told Dow Jones. "This is very important, also in view of technological advances, with software being developed that allows for automated face recognition."

During Thursday's hearing at the Federal Administration Court in Bern, Thuer showed examples in Street View where photos were not blurred.

Meanwhile Google argues Street View already blurs "99 percent" of all faces and license plates and that having to manually review every photo would incur "prohibitively high" costs.

"In order to get to 100%, it would take multiple rounds of human reviews," Peter Fleischer, Google's global counsel for privacy, told reporters.

"We believe that Street View respects Swiss Data protection law and brings enormous benefits to both local users and businesses," a Google spokeswoman told PCMag on Tuesday. "Street View has proved very popular in Switzerland since its launch and we want people to continue enjoying it."

While the court decides, yesterday Google sent a camera-equipped snowmobile to the Swiss Alps as part of an ambitious plan to photograph and chart 218 miles of downhill runs, the Seattle Times reports.

In recent years Europe has given Google's lawyers plenty of court time over privacy concerns in Street View. The service , but only after Google agreed to blur the homes of those who requested it. In October, Italian officials required Google to about when its Street View vehicles would be passing through. A month before, Google was due to security concerns.

In a positive development for Street View, earlier this week Israeli officials announced they would work with Google to bring Street View to Israel .