Info Commissioner contacted 74 times over Street View

interesting view

"The photos were of the streets, not the people, and the people simply happened to be on those streets."

And if i was taking a photo of a street scene that also contained a number of mp's or celebrities entiring/leaving a brothel, could I happily publish it as a street scene with a few incidental people in it?

What if i take and publish a picture of a street scene that also happens to contains your bedroom window with you wandering about in the buff?

i have a suspicion the view would be slightly different. The simple solution, is to ban any picture of a person for commerical use, without that person's express permission. So you can have street view if you remove all the advertising!

Expectation of privacy on the street?

"Google may have breached the Data Protection Act while collecting images for Street View because people were not informed that photos were being taken"

I don't understand that. I have commented many times here and elsewhere that it is my understanding that it is perfectly legal to take photographs of anything on a public highway or on public land. I believe there may have been some alterations recently, regarding pictures containing members of our astute police force (if this is the case, it's pretty outrageous, in my opinion) but people that just happen to be on the street are incidental to Google's main aim and I believe they have set a dangerous precedent by offering to blur faces, number plates, etc; out of goodwill. Are all the tourists in London up in arms about being caught on OTHER tourists' cameras? Of course not. Again, if you on the street and in the public eye (don't forget, we are ALL public, you know!) you must expect that other people will see you and whatever it is you happen to be doing. No expectation of privacy, there. What's so different about a camera?

Golly!

I hope they didn't take any snaps of police officers or vehicles or any particular public buildings that they weren't told they couldn't take snaps of.

Especially snaps of police officers behaving like utter bastards that might get the officer reprimanded.

In fact if you take a picture of a building that is already on streetview then is that an argument against not-being-allowed-to-take-the-picture ?

@Sooty

"And if i was taking a photo of a street scene that also contained a number of mp's or celebrities entiring/leaving a brothel, could I happily publish it as a street scene with a few incidental people in it?"

Of course not, silly! You'd sell it to The Sun and/or The Daily Mail!

"What if i take and publish a picture of a street scene that also happens to contains your bedroom window with you wandering about in the buff?"

There's a little thing called "curtains" that most people have closed when wandering about in the buff ... ESPECIALLY if that window overlooks a street. There is a term for people who refrain from closing the curtain in such a circumstance ... "convicted of indecent exposure".

"i have a suspicion the view would be slightly different. The simple solution, is to ban any picture of a person for commerical use, without that person's express permission. So you can have street view if you remove all the advertising!"

Advertising? What advertising?