What Does Europe Have Against Google?
It's been a rough week for Google in Europe. EU antitrust authorities announced Wednesday that they've opened an investigation into Google's search and advertising businesses, the same day that three Google executives were found guilty in Italy for privacy violations.
Now several news agencies are reporting Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has been rebuked by the head of Europe's data protection agencies in a Feb. 11 letter. The letter concerns Google's Street View, a service that adds photos of locations around the world to supplement the popular Google Maps.
Google protects the privacy of people captured in Street View photos by blurring out faces and vehicle license plates after a year. But EU privacy authorities want Google to do that much sooner, according to reports. The EU has also asked Google to give more advanced alerts to the appropriate communities that its Street View vans are filming in an area.
Google called its storage of unblurred photos for a year "legitimate and justified," according to several media reports.