New Delhi, India — Barely three weeks after Google’s now infamous Street View camera cars only started sweeping around the streets of Bangalore, the company has grounded the fleets after receiving police complaints about the company’s 360-degree photo-snapping in the city.
Those plans are now on hold after the city’s commissioner of police expressed concerns. The authorities informed the search engine leader to suspend taking images because it has not secured the necessary security clearance.
According to TOI, Google received a letter from the Commissioner of Police of Bangalore asking the Mountain View, Calif.-based company to pull its cars and tricycles from the streets of Bangalore for the time being. The cars were taking pictures and mapping streets of Bangalore. The data was supposed to be used for Google’s Street View service.
The search giant did not provide details on the exact concerns expressed in the commissioner’s letter. But according to statement furnished to Media nama, a Google spokesperson said, “We can confirm that we received a letter from the Commissioner of Police regarding Street View. We are currently reviewing it and have stopped our cars until we have a chance to answer any questions or concerns the Police have.”
The tech titan commenced its Street View rendezvous in Bangalore, home to some Indian military sites, in late May.
According to Medianama, quoting an anonymous source that said Street View was suspended because of laws relating to data collection by foreign companies. India’s foreign direct investment (FDI) policy limits direct foreign investment in news and media companies to 26 percent, but Medianama questioned whether Street View should be regarded as a publishing entity.
Besides, we do not think there is the need for any policy on a publishing entity to collect data, unless it is for sensitive locations: International media entity do not need permits to click photographs in India, do they? the blog continued.
Google said it is exploring ways to finding a solution between its users’ needs and governmental security concerns, said Vinay Goel, the company’s head of products in India, according to the report.
“We understand the sensitivity associated with certain locations and are committed to working with relevant stake holders to ensure that their concerns are addressed,” Goel told the paper.
Even though Google Street View has proven immensely popular with users, the service has faced resistance in several parts of the world. In February, Google said it would not comply with a request to manually blur photos in Switzerland. Hanspeter Thuer, Switzerland’s privacy watchdog, demanded that Google guarantee that every license plate and face is completely blurred in Street View, but Google said that manually blurring photos would incur “prohibitively high” costs.
Moreover, the data in Street View is not disclosed to users in real-time but there have been privacy concerns over its use. In Austria and Czech Republic the service was banned temporarily. Recently, Street View concerns in developing countries are significantly different to obstacles Google has hit in Germany and Switzerland, which were about privacy and data retention and told European Union that it may withdraw the service from the member countries due to new laws on storing photographs.
Google officials were unavailable to comment to the Technology blog on Tuesday morning. But in the past, the company has said that it plans to map all major cities in India — the 27th country once the mapping of Bangalore was complete, the Deccan Herald reported.
Available in 27 countries, Googles’ Street View combines 360-degree, street-level images collected by a team of Google-operated cars and tricycles equipped with specially mounted cameras. Until last month, India had been uncharted territory for Google.