Google Streetview went live in the UK yesterday and as sure as night follows day, the press were scratching their heads as to how they could spin this into a scare story.
Thanks to that noted journal of scientific integrity, the Daily Mail, we now know that Facebook causes cancer. It is the same media that is now touting Google Streetview as the monster that will erode our civil liberties. Perhaps understandably, there have been concerns expressed regarding private residencies being photographed against their owner’s wishes.
I would wager that these concerns have been expressed by well meaning citizens whose residences are no doubt viewed by the dozens or even hundreds of people who walk by their house every single day. It could be convincingly argued that actual people walking by an unclosed window of your house pose a more significant threat than someone inadvertantly catching a glimpse of your house on Streetview in the hope that the window they saw open in the photo will still remain in it’s inviting state when they make the journey across the country to steal your stuff.
Google has gone to impressive lengths to assure the anonimity of those it has photographed, blurring out as it has faces and car number plates. It has been reported that a handful of faces have slipped through the net unblurred but time will tell as to whether this is likely to have a significant impact on the wellbeing and privacy of those caught on camera. Let’s not forget the fact that Streetview has been live in the United States since May 2007. One would think that in a significantly larger and more populated country, the chances of major Streetview related privacy issues being publicly known would be much higher. It appears that the most serious instances caught on camera were a woman urinating in the street and a man apparently breaking into a property, an attack which he almost certainly didn’t plan using google maps.
This brings us nicely on the accusations made by an Indian Court that Google aided terrorists by not blurring out images of government buildings on Google maps. I’ve no doubt that they also called for the banning of aircraft that could take such pictures, the sacking of road builders who built the roads that car bombers could park on as well as the car manufacturers that could provide them with such transport.
Google Earth, Maps and now Streetview have turned the world into an even smaller village allowing us to discover and view places on the other side of the world from the comfort of our chairs. If the fallout from this immense, and FREE, privilege is that you might get caught having a wee in the street then perhaps you should pull your pants up.
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