I’m not convinced it’s that simple. The info that Google makes publicly available is info that’s already publicly available, Google just makes it really easy to get. Any restrictions on Google’s Street View or similar activities would come down to a restriction on convenience, not content.
What about information that they make privately available, for cost? Do we even know what they do provide or what information is used for? The data-mining from emails, is it only for directed advertising? The browsing habits collected by Google Analytics?
What happens to this data? Who has access to it? Do you have the right to see what information is held about you? Do you have the right to correct information? These sort of things are dealt with in the EU by the Data Protection Directive. All local implementations have strict rules about what can and cannot be done. What happens when Google transfers said information back to the US?
There is probably a different attitude to publishing information that is potentially publicly available. For example here in Germany I could have attended a certain trial I read about in today’s paper and learned the full names of two people tried for and convicted of throwing a bottle at a police officer and missing. But, reading about it in the paper, I only leaned that it was a 19-year old man and a 23-year old woman. (BTW the sentence for the 19-year-old was to read a book on traumatic experiences of police officers and write a three-page handwritten summary 
). The press’ code of conduct (stricter than the actual law) only permits identifying accused or convicted persons in rare circumstances.
So, ease of access for the general public is deemed crucial to the effective privacy of information that anyone could learn by going to some trouble.
Same for Street View - anyone can walk up to a house on the public sidewalk and look at the house, but they have to go to some trouble for it, which for practical purposes limits the amount of public scrutiny the residents are exposed to. (There is also a concern cited by German and Swiss data protection commissioners - the Street View cameras are at a height of 2.75 m (9 ft) above ground, i.e. they can look over fences and hedges designed to block the view of people).
There is a world of difference between a dumb algorithm scanning your email so it can be formatted correctly or even generating symple tags besed on keywords, and what Google does.
In fact, do you even know what they do? Do you know what information they store about your email even after you delete them? Do you know how much information your search history is cross-referenced with? Do you know how long they plan on keeping this data? Do you have any guarantee that they have deleted it even if they say they have? Do you know what they might do with this data in the future?
The answer to all of these questions is NO, you have no idea. It’s not the people who voiced concern over the privacy aspects who were idiotic, it’s those that forgot about them so quickly.
I use GMail, but I’m also aware that I’m sacrificing something of value by doing so. I’m not saying any of this is a problem now, but ‘constant vigilance is the price of freedom’ and handwaving it all away is recipe for trouble IMO.
The height of the camera is a legitimate gripe, but hardly earth-shattering. And StreetView is limited to a single picture, it’s not like it’s a running web-cam feed of your comings-and-goings.
Some examples of personal information published in US media that would be considered grave violations of the subject’s privacy in most European countries.
But here, Google is no different from any other internet service provider. You seem to have singled out Google for suspicion, but the concerns you list would apply to every provider on the planet.
Because it is central to Google’s business to acquire as much information of any kind as ever possible and apply their genius to making use of it in novel ways.
That’s quite different from other companies’ visions. Most other either leverave unique advantages other than the information held by them (e.g. in Microsoft’s case: incumbency), or seek to offer non-unique goods and services in a better and/or cheaper way (e.g. most providers of Internet services).
My neighbors in Eastern Tennessee who have privacy fences around their properties were quite wroth when they discovered that Streetview showed an area they considered private. As far as I recall, they sent an email to Google asking that their property be blurred out (and what credentials they were asked for I do not know). A few days later, the view was blurred.
The fences are all about 7.5 feet tall, so the 9 foot height mentioned above seems reasonable.
Knowledge is power.
And Canadians are overall so worried about this that I knew nothing about this, and care even less.
Thanks for the reminder of why I usually avoid GD, though. 
No, what’s idiotic is using any kind of email system to send information over the internet that you cannot tolerate being retained forever or cross referenced in any way by anybody.
Internet email is not and never has been secure.
Quoth tschild:
Except you can’t really criticize Google for being unique. It’s not their fault that nobody else really does the same thing they do, and Microsoft is even trying, with Bing.
I’ve hated Google ever since I had that nightmare about being a pilot in WW2 and being chased by squadron after squadron of Japanese fighters…
*The move follows similar probes in Austria, Germany, Italy and the United States after Google admitted its Street View cars, which have been cruising and taking photographs of cities in over 30 countries, had inadvertently gathered fragments of personal data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems.
The company said it had planned to use the Wi-Fi network data to add features to its mapping services. It has since stopped collecting any more Wi-Fi network data.*
Can someone please explain exactly what Google did? How do you “inadvertently” gather personal wi-fi data? And how would you then “plan to use it”? Do they mean Google said, “Oh well, since we have this data that we didn’t mean to gather, we might as well use it.”? That makes no sense. And how would personal wi-fi data be used to “add features” to a mapping service? Would the map say things like, “The guy in this house really likes porn.”? I just don’t get it.
There’s a whole industry devoted to collecting masses of random data associated with users or IP addresses and finding ways to use it to sell things to people.
Yes, but can anyone answer my questions?
What I heard on Spanish TV is that they were planning on showing free wifi hotspots, but I don’t know whether that’s directly from Google or a WAG from the reporter.
And similarly for Europe, because there’s a lot of variation from one country to another. The extent to which Street View is allowed, at least so far, has not been dictated by the EU, but each country decides for itself. IIRC it’s completely banned in Greece, although last I checked there were photospheres at many of the popular sites.
Maybe if we were having this discussion, let’s say, in 1947, but not now.
The UK and the EU have, in effect, similar legislation, because of the GDPR