Unblurred Street View images provide mugging lead

Google last week said that in the "long term" it will comply with demands by the European Union's data protection watchdogs that original images are deleted. The demand was made by the Article 29 Working Party, a committee of the 27 member nations' privacy regulators.

"The Article 29 Working Party has asked that we set a time limit on how long we keep the unblurred copies of panoramas from Street View, in a way that appropriately balances the use of this data for legitimate purposes with the need to deal with any potential concerns from individuals who might feature incidentally on the Street View imagery," said Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, in a blog post last week.

"We will meet their request that long term we only keep the blurred copy of Street View panoramas, and we will work with them and our engineers to determine the shortest retention period that also allows for legitimate use under EU laws," he said.