Google Street Voyeur invading your privacy soon?

Stan Beer
Saturday, 02 June 2007 06:51

Opinion and Analysis

Google Earth is entertaining; Google Maps is useful; Google Street View is an outrageous and frightening invasion of your privacy. It's that simple.

The new Google product almost seems to be designed to test the limits of what private information a company can gather and what the public will put up with.

At the moment, you have one digital imaging company tasked with the job of gathering high resolution street level images without permission of real people going about their private business from a car mounted camera in just five US cities. What can we expect in the future?

One can imagine that Google could outsource the same job to dozens of digital imaging companies with hundreds of cars roaming the streets of the world's major cities - if governments let them.

In its defence, Google may claim that anyone who feels that their privacy is infringed by an image may opt to request that the offending image be removed. Google may also claim that the images show nothing that cannot be seen by anyone walking down a street. Neither claim is a valid argument against charges of privacy invasion.

As web surfers well know, once an individual's privacy has been compromised on the Internet by publicly posted information - whether data or an image - the damage has been done. If a person's image has been captured while picking their nose, walking into a brothel or in an intimate embrace with their best friend's wife, the damage has been done whether the image is removed or not.

Individuals walking down the street may see many things. However, they don't have the capability of capturing everything they see on an image database which is then made available for global viewing. To claim any sort of equivalence between what an individual sees and images gathered for Google's database is nonsense.

If the US Federal, State and Municipal governments don't outlaw the current version of Google Street View, then it is likely that European governments, with their strict privacy laws, will. At the very least, the images should be blurred to the point where individuals cannot be identified.

There is also another issue that Google, a company already spending a portion of its annual budget on litigation, should be prepared for. If a person's privacy has been compromised by Google Street View to the point where they've suffered some sort mental, emotional, financial or even physical damage, look out for law suits. In fact, even at this early stage there may be individuals who feel that they fall into this category.

Google is a great company that is on the leading edge of taking the Web to the next level of its development. However, no-one has the right to reach into our lives and put them on display like a gigantic Truman Show.