Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 06 August 2008 16:27
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Anyone can drive down your street and look at your house, and you can do the same elsewhere.
It's not as if you or your home are under continuous surveillance. The images represent moments in time, and unless you have particular knowledge that can be used to date an image (eg, the days that your old fridge was on the nature strip waiting for the hard rubbish collection), it's very hard to pin down exactly when they were taken.
Is Google likely to renew the images even once a year? Probably not.
However, I'm not letting Google off the hook when it comes to leaving public roads - there has been at least one claim that photographs were taken on private land. That's clearly not acceptable.
Is that a double standard, as in "one law for the rich and another for the rest of us"? I don't think so. Even though I don't object to the front of my house being visible on the web, it would be another if photos taken from my back garden appeared - even though it is overlooked by neighbouring two-storey homes, and the overhead photography available on Google Maps is remarkably detailed in my area.
But back to Street View. Google already fuzzes out faces and vehicle licence plates from Street View images, though clearly that's not sufficient to stop either being recognised by people in the know.
What sort of things are people concerned about? Find out on
page 3.
