When Google points at you
Google's Street View project aims to photograph every nook and cranny of the cities of the world but in the USA, where this was first deployed, it has led to a number of complaints about invasions of privacy. Now it is coming to the UK too, and not everyone is happy about it.
Google has a fleet of Street View cars touring the country, black saloons with a four foot long mast mounted on the roof, atop of which are several cameras. These cars drive up and down roads photographing everything as they go to enable Google to build up a 360 degree panoramic view of the world. It sounds like a great idea, a work of art which is only possible in the digital age, but when people look closer and discover themselves in there they are often not so impressed.
Some of the complaints concern pictures which look straight into someone's living room and in one case you could clearly see the owner's puzzled cat staring back out at the camera. Other randomly captured images which have since been removed included a picture of a man emerging from a sex shop in Soho, a workman in Uxbridge scratching his nether regions, and a man in Shoreditch taken ill and vomiting on the pavement. Google says it blurs out faces and number plates to protect privacy, and will take down pictures if complaints are received, but only after the picture is published, and in many cases the person at the centre of the picture will not be aware of their infamy until the image has been grabbed by other sites and spread across the internet, even printed in newspapers, and by then the damage has been done.
When the Street View car arrived last month in Broughton, a small village outside Milton Keynes, residents spotted it and quickly decided they did not want their privacy invaded and surrounded the car, preventing its progress. The driver eventually decided to give up and go away, although whether or not Google will send a car back at another time remains to be seen.
Speaking to the BBC, one of the residents explained that they had no problem with people taking general photos of the village High Street, the "picture postcard" scene, but the detailed and indiscriminate recording of every house, every front door, was unacceptable. Paul Jacobs, who led the protests in Broughton, said "We've had three burglaries in six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike."
The costs to Google of running such ambitious projects must be huge, but clearly it feels it can make a commercial return on them in the long run. However, it is wringing its hands at the moment over YouTube which reportedly lost $470 million last year due to its high running costs and failure to attract sufficient advertising. Google, which has large offices in London, has also been criticised recently for avoiding UK tax by routing most of its UK earnings through Ireland where corporation tax is lower, saving it about £100 million a year.
24th April 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.