Along with forthcoming services like Google Maps, Google StreetView, Google Earth, and the like, comes the new era of geo-information Web sites. By combining electronic maps with photos and data such as street names, company addresses, descriptions of public buildings, and other points of interest—even the menu of the restaurant at the corner—comprehensive "virtual" realities are created.
The privacy issues of a German geo-information Internet platform were scrutinized by the Regional Court of Cologne in a judgment dated 13 January 2010 (28 O 578/09). The geo-information platform about the German city of Cologne contained inter alia photos of single buildings and land plots. By entering a specific address, the users were automatically navigated to the respective location on the map, combined with the photos of the buildings situated there.
The court held that the publication of the address and the photo of the respective building were to be considered personally identifiable information relating to the inhabitants of the respective building. Yet, the judges found that the making available of these PII on the Internet platform is compliant with German privacy laws—even though the plaintiff had not consented to the publication of the data. In this respect, the court applied the so-called media privilege enshrined in Sec. 41 of the German Federal Data Protection Act, which the Federal Court of Justice refused to apply with respect to Internet rating Web sites (as reported in the November 2009 issue of the Privacy Advisor, page 12), because in contrast to the latter, the geo-information platform shall serve journalistic-editorial purposes; the crucial factor being a multitude of further contents such as descriptions of the buildings, historical information, further photos, etc., which made it distinct from the teacher-rating platform scrutinized by the Federal Court of Justice.
