Israel now allows Google to take pictures of their streets

Israel Government finally allowed Google to monitor their street through the use of cars with mounted camera on it.  The images are going to be sent to Google maps, so Google can provide a clearer view of the area.

The decision got taken from the previous week by Israel’s data security watchdog, ILITA  that gave Google Street View the rights to send their cars to monitor the street of Israel.  The cars are going to collect a series of photo from any area that it goes.

The concept of Street View, launched in 2006, allows Google Map users view panoramic street sights on the site, letting the users take a virtual on key cities on any country they want to research.

Panoramic images shot by cars that come with exceptional cameras, allowing the cars to automatically photograph an area while running through the streets.  The images then sent and processed in the US, where different facts such as faces and registration plates gets robotically blurred prior to publishing the picture on Google Maps.

gooHowever, it is not sweet ride for Google as many countries opposed to the idea that the giant company would take a photograph on every corner of their cities.  Many got concerned over the random photographs taken by the car.

In its decision, ILITA expects that Street View offer the public with a consistent way to appeal for the blurring some key details before it gets published over the Internet.

The government agency also requested that the public be informed about the whereabouts and the route of the high-tech car.  It would also help if the cars has a distinct marked which lets people know that it belongs to Google.

The decision came six months following the event that the ministers addressed the concerns that the online mapping tool can be exploited.  Letting the enemy of the state, get a close-up three-dimensional view of places all over the country.  The concern of ministers is that it could be used by some bad elements in targeting cities in the Jewish state.

However, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) expressed their fears over the decision, warning everyone that would cause people’s right to privacy to disappear.

ACRI thinks that it is a shame since the justice ministry not able to learn from the bad experiences in Europe that the service has done.  In Europe, the people learned that authorities can not protect them from getting exploited by international corporations.

In the preceding year, Google confessed that the Street View cars manage to grab too many pictures of the said country.  The pictures  then sent over to the unsecured wireless networks that include email and passwords.