BERLIN —
Google, whose Street View mapping service has generated legal scrutiny in parts of Europe because of privacy concerns, won a partial victory Friday in Switzerland when the country’s highest court upheld Google’s right to film and document Swiss residential buildings with its technology.
The ruling, while requiring Google to adjust Street View to continue operating in Switzerland, leaves the service legally intact in a country with some of the strictest privacy safeguards in the world.
The Swiss case was the last one pending in Europe challenging the basic legality of Street View’s documentation methods, which had raised privacy concerns when Google’s cars started compiling street photos in 2007.
With the exception of Greece, European regulators and courts have allowed Google to roll out Street View in 25 countries in Europe, though often with restrictions.
In its ruling Friday, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, the Bundesgericht, said Google did not have to guarantee 100 percent blurring of the faces of pedestrians, auto license plates and other identifying markers captured by Google’s Street View cars. The company, based in Mountain View, California, says its technology blurs faces and license plates in 99 percent of cases.
While the Swiss court sided with Google on the adequacy of its digital pixilation methods, the panel upheld several conditions demanded by the national regulator. Those conditions may require Google to lower the height of its Street View cameras to stop them from peering over garden walls and hedges, to completely blur out sensitive facilities like women’s shelters, prisons, retirement homes and schools, and to advise communities in advance of scheduled tapings.
“This was what I would call a typical Swiss legal compromise,” said Daniel Fischer, a privacy lawyer at the firm AFP Advokatur Fischer & Partner in Zurich. “Both sides got to keep face.”
Mr. Fischer said the legalities of Street View were more controversial for Swiss privacy lawyers than Swiss consumers, many of whom use the service.
Google introduced Street View in 2009 in Switzerland, where privacy is so closely guarded that many residents do not list their names on their front doors or mailboxes.
The national regulator had thrown the future of Street View into question in 2010 by demanding that Google’s pixilation technology function without error, 100 percent of the time. If the high court had sided with the regulator, Google could have had to withdraw Street View from Switzerland because it could not meet demands for absolute accuracy.
Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, said in a statement that the company would review the recommendations for adjusting its Street View procedures in Switzerland.
“We’re pleased the Swiss court has upheld a key part of our appeal, acknowledging that we have strong privacy controls in Street View,” Mr. Fleischer said.
Hanspeter Thür, the Swiss federal data protection and information commissioner, who filed the complaint against Google, said he was very happy with the ruling.
“It supports the core of our legal argument,” Mr. Thür said in a statement. “The High Court has also underlined that the anonymization of individuals through their public depiction in the Internet must take place under a strict set of requirements.”
Google employs several hundred workers at an office in Zurich, one of the largest it has outside the United States.
The company is still under intense scrutiny in Europe for its collection of private e-mail and Web traffic data from unsecured home Wi-Fi routers, which Google compiled with other equipment mounted on Street View cars and did not disclose in advance to privacy regulators.
German prosecutors in Hamburg and the Hamburg data protection supervisor are continuing to investigate the illegal collection of Internet data, but have been hindered in part by the refusal of the Google engineer responsible for the project, Marius Milner, who lives in Palo Alto, California, to speak publicly about the project.
Even in the United States, Mr. Milner refused to speak to Federal Communication Commission investigators, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The F.C.C. in April fined Google $25,000 for refusing to cooperate with its investigation, but ruled that the company’s collection of unencrypted Wi-Fi data was legal.
Google also faces an antitrust investigation in Europe over its alleged abuse of dominance in the Internet search market. On Friday, the competition commissioner who is leading the inquiry gave Google an early July deadline to make compromises in the case or face formal charges, according to Bloomberg News.
“By early July, I expect to receive from Google concrete signs of their willingness to explore” a settlement, the commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said during a speech, according to Bloomberg. If the proposals “turn out to be unsatisfactory, formal proceedings will continue through the adoption of a statement of objections.”
In late May, Mr. Almunia had asked Google for a proposal in the course of the next few weeks.
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