Privacy Law in Germany: Lex Street View?

Till Steffen, Senator of Justice of the City of Hamburg, tabled a motion to the Bundesrat, the German second chamber, proposing new provisions in regard to Google Street View and similar services. It is Hamburg's Data Protection Officer Johannes Caspar that investigated for violations of German privacy law by Google Street View (and also Facebook) recently.

The bill contains the following main provisions:

• If a photo is taken under circumvention of a visual protection, it shall not to be considered publicly available data;
• An obligation to inform the competent authorities and the public, for anyone who wants to take photos of the public systematically, referenced to geographical data;
• An obligation to blur faces and license plates not only for display purposes, but for the raw data;
• A right for anyone to request to disable access to photos of his/her house.

The bill would limit the "Freedom of Panorama" in German law, that allows anyone to take, publish and distribute pictures of the public. Already now, that freedom can be limited by the individual rights of persons displayed. The bill is clearly limited to systematically geo-referenced images, and thus does not affect ordinary press photos.