Google to introduce 'Street View' in Germany

Google will introduce its ``Street View'' mapping feature for 20 of Germany's largest cities before the end of the year, the company announced Tuesday, launching a new debate over privacy in Germany.



German officials have been one of the harshest critics of the ``Street View'' program, which provides detailed photographs of neighborhoods taken by Google cameras.



At the insistence of authorities, the faces of individuals and licenses plates will be blurred and people can also ask to have images of their homes removed from the database starting next week a move aimed at dispelling privacy fears.



``The tool available before the launch of the service is unique to Germany,'' Google Inc. spokeswoman Lena Wagner said Tuesday, adding the company hopes to launch maps of the 20 cities in November, then expand the service.



The cities will include Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne, among others. But privacy watchdogs remain critical as the announcement comes on short notice, in the middle of summer holidays, with residents only able to ask for their house to be removed for a four-week window.



Johannes Caspar, head of the Hamburg office for data protection, also criticized Google for refusing to set up a hot line to answer questions. He said has also urged Google be more transparent about how it plans to handle the data of those who object to the mapping program. ``Google is missing an opportunity to restore trust,'' he said in a statement.



Wagner insists the company is doing more than legally required to protect people's privacy. ``Street View'' has been controversial in Germany and other countries amid fears that people, filmed without their consent, could be seen on the panoramic footage doing things they didn't want to be seen doing or in places where they didn't want to be seen.



The US Internet giant lost the trust of many in Europe this spring when it had to acknowledge that the technology used by its ``Street View'' cars had also vacuumed up fragments of people's online activities broadcast over public hi-fi networks for the past four years.

Several thousand Germans already use ``Street View'' every week to plan holidays or to look up an area in one of the 23 countries covered so far, Wagner said. ``Talks with data protection officials are always controversial, but the users like 'Street View,''' she said.

Malware threat at a new high

Production of software code known as malware, which can harm computers and steal user passwords, reached a new high in the first six months of 2010.



Total malware production continued to soar and 10 million new pieces of malicious code were catalogued.The users of Apple's Mac computers, considered relatively safe from virus attacks, that they may also be subjected to malware attacks in the future. "For a variety of reasons, malware has rarely been a problem for Mac users. But those days might end soon.



"Our latest threat report depicts that malware has been on a steady incline in the first half of 2010," Mike Gallagher, chief technology officer of Global Threat Intelligence for McAfee Inc, the No. 2 security software maker, said in the report that was obtained by Reuters.



In April, McAfee Labs detected the Mac-based Trojan known as "OSX/HellRTS," which reads or modifies the contents of the clipboard or plays tricks on the user like opening and closing the CD drive. "We do not want to overstate this threat. But it serves as a reminder that in this age of cybercrime, data theft and identity theft users of all operating systems and devices must take precautions," McAfee said.



After reaching a high point last year, the spread of spam messages has plateaued in the second quarter. Computer attackers bank on major events such as the football World Cup to poison Internet searches and lure web users to click on infected links.