Switzerland is taking Google to court over privacy concerns related to Google’s Street View service. The BBC reports that Swiss privacy official Hanspeter Thuer is leading the country’s case.

Mr Thuer is especially concerned about people shown in sensitive locations such as hospitals, prisons or schools.

He also said that the height of the camera was problematic because it allowed a view over fences, hedges and walls, meaning that more could be seen from Street View than by a normal passer-by.

Google reps and Thuer met back in August shortly after Street View launched in that country, and Thuer demanded then that Google “immediately withdraw its online service Google Street View concerning Switzerland.” Thuer says Google has not complied with Switzerland’s demands.

The BBC quotes a Google official as saying the company will “vigorously contest” the lawsuit.

For more on Google’s similar, ongoing legal battles around the world, see our Google: Street View archives.

Today is the deadline for Google and its partners in the Google Book Search settlement to submit a new version of the settlement that satisfies the recent concerns laid out by the US Justice Department and others.

But instead, as the New York Times reports, they’ve asked federal judge Denny Chin for an extension until this Friday, Nov. 13.

In their extension request, Google and the settlement parties say they met with the DOJ as recently as this past Friday, Nov. 6. Assuming the request is granted, and the revised settlement is filed by Friday, it’s possible a final hearing could still happen in late December or early January, as originally expected.

For background on the legal issues involving the lawsuit and settlement, see our Google Book Search archives.

One of the factors behind the US Justice Department’s (DOJ’s) objection to the now-defunct Google-Yahoo search ads deal, which was far less sweeping than the pending Yahoo-Bing/Microsoft deal, was the objection of the powerful advertising trade organization the Association of National Advertisers. Now, another advertising trade organization, the “4As,” or American Association of Advertising Agencies, has formally announced its support for the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal.

Below is the full text of the letter, which was signed by 4As President and CEO Nancy Hill, along with the heads of the four major advertising holding companies–Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO, Publicis Groupe; Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP; Michael I. Roth, Chairman and CEO, Interpubic Group of Companies; and John Wren, President and CEO, Omnicom Group:

Advertising is the fuel that powers the Internet. Most websites depend on online advertising to survive – it’s what allows them to offer consumers free content and services.

A very important form of online advertising is search advertising – the sponsored links that appear when a search engine answers a query. A healthy, competitive market for search and search advertising is crucial to the Internet’s future. We believe that Yahoo! and Microsoft’s proposal to combine their technologies and search platforms is good for advertisers, marketing services agencies, website publishers and consumers.

These benefits are too important to wait for. As leading members of the advertising and marketing services industry, we urge the Department of Justice to bring its antitrust review to a speedy conclusion. This proposal enhances competition, and should be allowed to take effect as soon as possible.

I’m sure there were plenty of discussions behind the scenes and this wasn’t simply a spontaneous expression of good will; just as there was much behind-the-scenes lobbying that resulted in objections to the earlier Google-Yahoo search ads deal. Regardless, this public pronouncement will have influence and make DOJ acceptance and approval of the Bing/Microsoft deal much more likely in my opinion.

The clock is ticking: Google and the parties involved in the Book Search lawsuit settlement have one month from today — until November 9 — to revise the settlement and satisfy the recent objections from the US Justice Department and others.

That may seem like an ambitious timeframe given the amount of objections the settlement has received. It also suggests that Google and the parties involved involved don’t think dramatic changes are needed to make everyone happy. In a New York Times article this week, Paul Aiken of the Authors Guild — one of the parties that originally sued Google — says that “the core agreement is going to stay the same.”

In the same article, others who’ve objected to the settlement say the new timeline is too short. “It’s hard to believe that so much could change that it would respond to all serious objections,” says Pamela Samuelson.

Meanwhile, the war of words continues.

After Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt spoke to the media this week about a number of topics — including the Book Search legal battle — Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive responded by calling some Google’s statements “twisted at best.”

On Thursday, the New York Times published an op-ed piece in which Brin addresses what he calls “myths” about the settlement with some sharp words of his own:

“…nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns.”

Touché!

The war of words may not go on much longer; with just a month to submit a new settlement, the Times says a final hearing could happen as soon as late December or early January.

For background on these legal issues, see our Google Book Search archives.

If you search for thepiratebay in Google and scroll to the bottom of the search results, you may notice that Google has said they removed search results from the page due to a complaint they received “under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” The result they removed included the Pirate Bay’s home page.

Here is a screen shot that shows Wikipedia coming up as the number one result for a search on the name of the web site. The second result is the main site, which I assume was not under a DMCA complaint?

As I explained, just scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see this notice:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 7 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

The interesting piece is that when you click over to view the actual complaint, the message I get is “the cease-and-desist or legal threat you requested is not yet available.” TorrentFreak reports that Destined Enterprises, the company that reportedly sent the DMCA notice, denied doing so. In fact, Destined Enterprises lawyer drafted a letter to Google asking them to show proof that they made such a request. Basically, they are worried that someone is using their name to make such requests.

Was this some type of fake DMCA request? Is this the new way to get competitors or sites out of the Google index? You thought search spam was bad, but to go through the legal route?

You can read more about this at Techmeme.

Postscript at 3:25pm (EST): The site is now back in the number one listing on Google and Google has updated the DMCA response at the bottom of the page to show two less pages.

Postscript 2: According to a statement Google gave CNET, the removal was a mistake due to a “request that erroneously listed thepiratebay.org” and that it would be restored. As CNET points out, Google’s not clear on how exactly this mistake transpired.

Right now there’s a court case in Italy that involves Google executives, who are being tried for violating Italian privacy laws. The case illustrates international conflicts of law issues and challenges for companies doing business (via the internet) in multiple nations with differing cultures and corresponding legal rules. In a less serious way Google has encountered this type of thing before with its Street View product on Maps in trying to comply with different privacy rules in the US, Canada and Europe. But this is the first time (to my knowledge) that jail time is at stake.

What happened? According to the BBC’s summary of the facts:

[A] video, posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube, showed a teenager with Down’s Syndrome being bullied by four students in front of more than a dozen others.

Prosecutors argue that Google did not have adequate content filters or enough staff to monitor videos.

They also argue that Google broke Italian privacy law by not preventing the the content from being uploaded without the consent of all parties involved.

There would be no civil, let alone criminal, liability if the incident had happened in the US. Publishers are generally insulated from liability in circumstances involving third party content postings on their sites. Notwithstanding stricter Italian privacy law, my guess is that anti-American and anti-Google sentiment are a subtext in this case.

Named Google defendants include David Drummond, Google’s SVP of  Corporate Development, and former Google CFO George Reyes. The BBC article says that the defendants could face up to three years in jail if they’re convicted. However if they were to in fact be convicted appeals would take place that would likely succeed. As unfortunate as the underlying facts may be there’s something inherently unreasonable at the heart of this case and probably the Italian courts will (eventually) recognize it.

This case illustrates how we truly live in a global society — certainly where the internet is concerned. And in most places, including the US, legal rules have not caught up to internet and technology developments.

Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I’m talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google.

The NY Times discussed the report, released today:

The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1,000 adult Internet users. The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell me whether or not you want the Web sites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests.” The results were later adjusted to reflect Census Bureau patterns in categories like sex, age, population density and telephone usage.

Tailored ads in general did not appeal to 66 percent of respondents. Then the respondents were told about different ways companies tailor ads: by following what someone does on the company’s site, on other sites and in offline places like stores.

The respondents’ aversion to tailored ads increased once they learned about targeting methods. In addition to the original 66 percent that said tailored ads were “not O.K.,” an additional 7 percent said such ads were not O.K. when they were tracked on the site. An additional 18 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked via other Web sites, and an additional 20 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked offline.

Lawmakers have been ready to regulate “behavioral advertising” for some time and the FTC has signaled that it did not believe marketers were doing a good enough job with self regulation. However, the new economic and political climate, more favorable toward regulation, combined with public frustration and anger generally have set the stage for regulation of some kind.

Search will largely be exempted because of the way it works — keyword matching rather than data mining —  although the search engines’ data retention policies are implicated by the report (which I quote a bit more fully on my blog). Yahoo is using search queries as part of its behavioral targeting and Google not long ago implemented “Interest Based Advertising,” a euphemism for behavioral targeting.

However, Google’s privacy and preferences management could become a kind of model in some new regulatory regime.

Very soon lawmakers will introduce legislation to more aggressively protect consumer privacy. One member of Congress, Rick Boucher of Virginia, recently wrote:

Because consumers need an assured level of control over the collection, use and sharing of information about them, a statute providing those assurances is now called for. That goal should be achieved by legislation, which reflects best industry practices and requires that they be followed by all websites that collect information from Internet users. Legislation assuring Internet users that their online experience is more secure will be a driver of greater levels of Internet uses such as e-commerce, not a hindrance to them.

In my view all this points to “when” rather than “if” and the question is: what disclosure and data management burdens will imposed on marketers and publishers? As I said, I think search will largely be unaffected but display could be profoundly affected.

If people are required to be given an “up front” opportunity to “opt-out” of targeting a majority likely will: “Tailored ads in general did not appeal to 66 percent of respondents.”

In the wake of last Friday’s objections to the Google Book lawsuit settlement, Google along with the two other parties that sued it, have asked the judge to delay further hearings on the settlement until an amended one can be put forth. Google, Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, made this request today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

A copy of the request is here. For more background on the case, see our post from Friday: Department Of Justice Files Objections To Google Book Search Settlement.

Google Can Sell Trademarked Keywords, EU Adviser Says from Bloomberg News reports the EU’s highest court has ruled Google can sell trademarked keywords in search ads. As we reported back in June 2008, Louis Vuitton sued Google over trademark issues with search ads and Google then appealed to this court. Google has won that appeal and has set the law on this matter across the whole European Union.

Advocate General Luis Miguel Poiares Pessoa Maduro said in a non-binding opinion to the European Court of Justice today in Luxembourg:

It is important not to allow the legitimate purpose of preventing certain trademark infringements to lead all trademark uses to be prohibited. Since the use by Google does not involve identical or similar goods or services, in principle there can be no risk of confusion on the part of the consumers.

In the US, Google recently allowed trademarks to be used in the AdWords copy.

This is the question that the US FCC will need to answer according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, which describes how the agency is grappling with new phone services such as Google Voice. Strictly speaking Google probably shouldn’t be considered a carrier because you can’t use it to make calls in the absence of another service; it’s really a “call management” and voice mail platform. However, you can use the Google Voice number as your primary telephone “identity,” something that was previously in the exclusive realm of telecom carriers.

Google Talk in one sense more like a carrier than Voice, although unlike Skype, you can’t use it outside the network of other IM users.

There are a range of issues raised by Google Voice and other new phone services that the FCC and similar regulatory bodies in other countries will need to figure out. Traditional telecom and wireless carriers are heavily regulated and will start putting pressure on the FCC if these newer services, which often circumvent them, are not subject to similar rules and guidelines. For example, according to the WSJ article:

One issue for the FCC: Google reserves the right to restrict calls to certain telephone numbers, such as adult chat lines or free conference-call centers, that have steep access charges.

Traditional phone companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. aren’t allowed to block those kinds of calls. Those companies could cry foul if newer phone services like Google Voice aren’t given the same treatment.

Several years ago, AT&T and others tried blocking calls to lines with inflated access charges. They were rebuked by the FCC, which said common-carrier phone companies can’t pick and choose the numbers they will patch through and those they will block.

Voice calls are data and more companies will get in on the business of transmitting and managing the delivery of that data across networks. The traditional carriers, who’ve invested billions in building the networks, won’t sit by and watch their fees evaporate and watch their business go third parties who piggyback on top of those networks without some sort of a fight. This is, in one sense, a version of the “net neutrality” debate applied to phone communication.