In 2009 Google started offering Google Street View services for Switzerland, and ever since various arguments have been brought forth between Google officials and Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection Commissioner Hanspeter Thuer. Just as in previous disagreements with Google and Germany, the main concern was privacy. Israel also deemed Google should withdraw the service from its country due to the great potential of terrorist threats by using images from Google Street View.

As we mentioned before, Germany took legal measures against Google Street View in order to protect the privacy of the German citizens. In order to reach a middle ground, Google agreed to blur citizens’ faces and number plates from cars with the help of  software, but the program had some omissions.

In Switzerland, a court rule will be issued in the following week to solve the matter and until then the service has been suspended. Thuer considers that for the moment there is one single solution: that of blurring citizens’ faces manually, a measure Google resents as it would be costly and ineffective.

The allegations forwarded to the Swiss legal institutions is another sensitive matter in the long row of issues Google has to deal with. Earlier this month we referred to the algorithm methods used by Google have also been under close watch by EU investigation bodies. The charges say that Google’s search results are prioritized and that it uses influential advertising space within newspapers and magazines to place its own links.