GDPR compliance for street-level imagery
If you capture and publish 360° street-level imagery in the EU or UK, the General Data Protection Regulation applies to you. Faces and license plates in your panoramas are personal data, and you are responsible for handling them lawfully. This guide outlines the core obligations and a practical workflow to meet them.
This is general information, not legal advice. Consult a qualified data protection professional for your specific case.
Why street imagery falls under the GDPR
A person is "identifiable" if they can be recognised directly or indirectly. A clear face makes someone identifiable; a license plate identifies a vehicle and, through it, a registered keeper. Capturing these in a public space does not exempt you — the GDPR still treats them as personal data once they are recorded and processed.
The obligations that matter most
- Lawful basis. You need a valid basis to process the imagery — commonly legitimate interest — and you must be able to justify it.
- Data minimisation. Collect and retain only what you need. Anonymising faces and plates before publication is the clearest way to minimise the personal data you expose.
- Privacy by design and by default. Build anonymisation into your pipeline rather than bolting it on after a complaint.
- Security of processing. Personal data must be protected while you handle it — including during the anonymisation step itself.
Anonymisation is the practical answer
Once faces and plates are irreversibly blurred, the published image no longer makes individuals identifiable, which sharply reduces your exposure. The key word is irreversible: a permanent Gaussian blur on the pixels — not a reversible overlay — is what removes the personal data. See our guides on blurring faces in 360° images and blurring license plates in equirectangular panoramas for the technical workflow.
Keep the processing off the cloud
Sending raw, un-anonymised imagery to a third-party cloud service to blur it means transferring personal data to another processor — adding contracts, transfer risk, and a fresh point of exposure. Processing on your own hardware avoids that entirely. Privacy Keeper runs anonymisation 100% offline: images never leave the machine, there is no telemetry, and no cloud upload is involved in processing.
Keep evidence you anonymised
Accountability is a GDPR principle in its own right — you must be able to demonstrate compliance, not just claim it. Every processing run writes an audit log recording the settings used and per-image results, giving you a record that anonymisation was applied across the dataset. Combined with "Made in Germany" development and offline processing, that gives you a defensible position if you are ever asked.