The BBC has published this follow-up on the legality of Google Street View in the UK, which I had previously written about here. Thankfully, the Information Commissioner has ruled on the side of sanity by upholding Britain’s privacy laws as they are written, as opposed to how they are sometimes interpreted by certain police officers and concerned citizens on the lookout for terrorists.

The project drew criticism from privacy campaigners worried it could breach data protection laws.

But the Information Commissioner said it was “satisfied” that Google had put in place safeguards to avoid risking anyone’s privacy or safety.

In a lot of places, but especially in the UK, there seems to be a growing gap between how the people on the street interpret privacy laws, and how the judicial and institutional levels of government uphold them. For now, the opinion of the latter group seems to be prevailing, but all it could take is a strong push of public opinion for the laws to change. It is of the paramount importance that free democratic societies not lose such basic rights as the ability to take pictures and video in public. Privacy laws making it illegal to do these things could strike a crippling blow to our freedom of speech, and more specifically, the free press. Privacy laws exist to protect citizens from surveillance and observation by their government; not to allow the government to censor free activity.

It said the safeguards Google was putting in place, such as blurring faces and registration plates, were sufficient to allay worries about privacy.

The statement said: “Although it is possible that in certain limited circumstances an image may allow the identification of an individual, it is clear that Google are keen to capture images of streets and not individuals.”

It’s refreshing to see that somebody is finally recognizing that Google Street View is not a sinister plan to go around violating people’s privacy by catching them in embarrassing situations and profiting off of their images, but rather an attempt to catalogue images of streets.

Every once in a while some sort of consumer/privacy watchdog group decides to criticize Google over matters of privacy, not fully appreciating how far Google goes to protect the privacy of their users. Naturally, privacy issues are going to arise when you’re in the business of collecting and sorting through information, but none of Google’s past actions have shown them to be a threat to anybody’s privacy. Fears that Google will pull an AOL are completely unwarranted.

“We’ve always said we will not launch in UK until we are comfortable Street View complies with local law,” they added, “and that we will use technology, like face-blurring, license plate blurring and operational controls, such as image removal tools, so Street View remains useful and in keeping with local norms wherever it is available.”

I won’t delude myself into thinking that as a company, Google can do no wrong. At the end of the day, they’re still a for-profit organization looking out for their interests, and the interests of their shareholders. However, Google is smart enough to know that its success in the information trade depends almost exclusively on its ability to keep user information confidential. The only reason it can compile as much information as it has is because people trust Google with that information; and the instant they do anything to betray that trust, their user base will instantly evaporate. So we don’t have to trust that Google will behave in a moral fashion out of the goodness of their hearts; we know that they’ll do it, because it’s good for business.

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• BBC.co.uk: Google Street View gets go ahead
• Lintbox.com: Quit Touching My Privacy
• BBC.co.uk: Innocent photographer or terrorist?
• Wikipedia.org: AOL Search Data Scandal