Citizen goes wrong way on Google Streets
Google Street car in Edmonton (via iNews880.com)
As we all slowly crushed under the weight of 6 billion articles about the coming Swine Flumaggedon, let’s all take some time to stop and thank the Ottawa Citizen for forging their own path.
See, while most media organizations are losing their heads over the swine flu, Citizen’s Robert Sibley has latched on to a more grave threat: a car with a CAMERA on it (c/o mathewi)
“We may once have thought we were under God’s surveillance. Now Google watches over us.”
Sibley’s piece asks whether the expansion of Google’s Street View is an invasion of privacy, a question that has been asked again and again the world over. What kind of expectation of privacy (root word: private) does one have in a public place? That’s the whole definition of the word public: it pretty much means “not private.”
One of the concerns, according to Sibley, is that Google is capturing things ”most would prefer be kept from public view…”
“When Street View debuted in the United States in 2007, bloggers posted pictures of people being arrested, urinating in public and sunbathing in their bikinis.
Wired magazine found images of police attending a fatality, a possible drug deal and a man climbing into an apartment (a possible burglary?)…”
Here’s a pretty surefire way of making sure thing you don’t want in “public view” showing up on Google Maps – don’t do these things in view of the public.
Also, kudos for the concern over Street View taking pictures of fatality investigations, arrests and dudes climbing on the outsides of buildings. These are, of course, not the type of things that the Ottawa Citizen might report on and take pictures of at the scene, right? (I even hear some newspaper websites are putting such photos on the Internet. That’s categorically different than what Google is doing…probably…somehow.)
I’m not saying that I’d be ecstatic to be shown on Street View doing something embarrassing. There’s a way I avoid it – by keeping my most embarrassing activities confined to the privacy of my home as much as I can.
Until Google starts snaking a camera under your front door and snaps some pictures, columnists should probably keep the “invasion of privacy” talk down to a minimum.
I mean, don’t we have more important things to blow way out of proportion?
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