Record fine for Google in Italy. A million euro fine for Google's car, the one that takes over the streets of the whole world and allows us to see every meter of asphalt through Street View through PCs and smartphones. The highway code has little to do with it. The problem, as is often the case, is privacy. For the Italian authorities, the vehicle - which travels incognito on large and small roads of the country - would have violated the right to privacy of citizens who were accidentally filmed by the camera mounted on the Mountain View vehicle.
The disputed facts date back to 2010, when Google's cars had traveled the Italian roads without being perfectly recognizable and not allowing people to decide whether or not to escape the filming.
The Privacy Guarantor, who had received several reports from users who did not wish to appear in the published photos, asked the Californian company to make its cars easily identifiable, through clearly visible signs or stickers, and to publish on its website, three days before filming, the locations visited. Then there was the fine, paid a few weeks ago by Google.
Mountain View has already taken some steps to make its cars more recognizable and to warn passers-by and residents of the neighborhoods concerned, the Privacy Guarantor said.
"It is a case of 2010 - a Google spokesperson tells Bloomberg - Now we have complied with all the requests that the Italian authorities had made of us".
The Italian fine is the heaviest ever paid by Google in terms of violation of privacy. A fine that surpassed the one imposed in December by Spain, which accused the American company of having collected personal data of users without explaining how it intended to use that information.
