Court tells Google to blur or forget about Street View

A Swiss court has cast doubts on Google’s argument that blurring faces and licence plates would be commercially unfeasible, All Things Digital reports, arguing the search giant’s current automated process falls short.

“The claimants are discounting any breach of privacy rights of numerous individuals, in the interest of their commercial success,” the court is quoted as saying.

“All privacy breaches could be avoided, but this would entail additional costs for the defendants, as they would have to make images (even more) unrecognisable in part manually.”

“The additional costs would obviously not, however, jeopardise the commercial survival of the defendants.”

Street View images are currently available for much of Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan and parts of Asia.