Word on the Street
by guest blogger Mike Blejer
Do you remember there was a time when the guy driving around town in a van taking pictures of you and your friends was just creepy ole' Mr. Johnson, and not a billion dollar corporate entity? Ah how I long for simpler times.
Google has recently introduced "street view" into their popular mapping and directions program Google maps. Street view gives you just what it suggests, a view from the streets of San Francisco, where the Google van has driven all about taking photographs everywhere it goes. The user is able to track through the pictures, presumably so they can see what their destination looks like before they set out. But in doing so Google has also built a patchwork quilt of pictures, including the one above, which have found their way to a voting contest on best inadvertent urban snapshot at wired magazine.
Google's defense has been that:
"it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. "Street View only features imagery taken on public property," the company said. "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street." - New York Times
It may be true that Google is only presenting information that anyone can see, but that's not really the point, and it doesn't follow that what they are presenting is not a privacy violation.
Consider the following pictures:
The first is just a million little pieces of information all sliced up, but when we collect those million little pieces and sequence them properly we get the second image. Even though both pictures contain the same information in the same amounts, it's obvious that they communicate vastly different content to the viewer. Similarly, even though the information that Google is presenting may be harmless and public when taken in as fragments by millions of people, when it is collected and synthesized by one company on one site the results are a whole other story. What's going to happen the first time someone googlemaps their kid's house only to find an image of their son or daughter walking around in the buff? And embarrassment is probably just on the lighter side of things. It doesn't take much to imagine a potential employer or customer looking you up for a meeting and getting a preview of what your living room looks like. What happens the first time you gets online and sees someone's bookshelf with a copy of "HIV and Me: Firsthand Information for Coping with HIV and AIDS?"
Right now it's just still shots, but how long before you're able to watch videos in real time as events unfold? How long before you can follow someone's journey through the day just by getting online? It used to be that in order to be a peeping Tom you had to really put yourself out there, whatever anyone says about the morality of the profession, there was a time when PTs had work ethic. Now you can just sit in the comfort of your parent's basement, sip on your steak smoothie, and surf away. Thanks Google!
Posted on June 02, 2007
