Is Google Your Big Brother? So think the residents of Greece, where one Grecian official declared, “We are not going to allow our country to become a Big Brother society.” The official is part of the Hellenic Data Protection (HDP), an organization intent upon preserving the country’s proprietary information, and determined to resist the Orwellian intrusion of the omniscient “Big Brother.” The debate stems from Google’s attempt to gain photographs of the city’s streets for use in its map feature, “Street View.”

It is not the first (or last) objection to Google’s photographing streets for its mapping services street view. In the UK, Sussex residents resisted Google’s photographic intrusion, complaining about similar reasons—the lack of privacy. And, for obvious reasons, the U.S. Government put the kibosh on Google’s taking pictures on military bases.

It’s not that Greece is against the progress of technology (or a potentially sweet view of the Acropolis in a drive-by picture shoot). It’s just that they want a little bit more info on how Google is going to process original images, how they will store them, how long they will keep them, how they will protect them from harm or molestation, and how Grecian denizens would know that they were being photographed if a tripod-mounted car drove past. Google has already intoned that they would blur out people’s faces, that they would blur the license plates of vehicles, and that they would even take pictures down if people requested that they do so.

But Greece is serious about privacy. So serious, in fact, that they have a government agency (Hellenic Data Protection, HDP) whose sole mission is to protect people’s privacy. The group even outlawed security cameras because of their potential misuse regarding privacy concerns.