Thread: Google street view...

I'm guessing privacy IS the big issue with Google street view and other google technologies. I basicly think street view is a good idea - nice to see where you're going if you're travelling or just trying to find out how to get to a store somewhere. But in Denmark its not legal to take pictures of people on private ground, so there are allready some issues there. In addition to that we have the new - take a picture of something and we'll google it for you function they have made - also a good idea, but with big brother scaryness one cannot help to think that face recognition software has been a reality for several years, so when can we shoot a photo of a random person and google them? ... cause google knows more about you than your mother

I think that the way we have in the UK is basically OK. Here if you are stood on public ground then you can take a photo even if it includes private areas which has caused problems when you have people like the press with long lenses. So basically if you don't want it public then you have to cover it up from the public street. The issue here has been with how well do you have to cover it. The cameras on the google vans are at about 10' - 15' up so they are significantly higher than a persons head. So taking it to extremes then you could have a long pole and drive around which I think would not be considered playing fair. Still, I have seen activists fly model aircraft right next to but not into military bases and that was apparently within the law so its very lax here.

The issue for me is not the taking of the photo but the publishing of it. Its a photo of private grounds being published globally. Its within the law but you will find that google make exceptions for all sorts of high ranking people in the same way that councils, police and politicians are exempt from some laws because of security. That's where I don't like it in that some people are deemed more worthy of having security than others. Its all gone very Animal Farm over the last few years here.

The other obvious problem is personally identifiable info like car number plates. You can read mine on it tho luckily my car is not outside my house at the time it was taken. If you can then set up a camera on a road doing auto number recognition then you can then match it back to whose house its from and then you know its empty. That's not a good idea at all. If I knew the people I saw the blurred faces of then I would be able to recognize them. The blur just delays the process. Its not even just faces and number plates tho but for now these are the two that are the issue and that have been vigorously scrapped by our gov.

In the same way that Rob said that you can scrape the data for one way streets I think in the future private companies other than google will be scraping the data for much more than this. If with photosynth you can model a 3D place using flickr photos then it seems a no brainer to model all of britain in 3D with the google views. When you get that you will then be able to extract even more private info from it and possibly set up new taxes based on the data. Theres lots and lots of potential bad from all of this to go with the good that we have right now. The thing is even if its not google doing it then you might have had another company do it and keep all the data private so you dont get any benefit at all from it. So in spirit its been a good thing but it worries me what kind of future were all allowing ourselves to have other people build for us. It seems to me like people are putting up the bars to the cell and asking us what color we would like them painted and all of us are arguing about the color with only a few of us saying we don't want bars and even fewer taking them down.

More and more people don't seem to care about their privacy, preferring to reveal all sorts of things "publicly".

Like the foursqaure twitter (aka Please Rob Me - I'm not at home right now).

-Rob A>

Yeah. I was momentarily tempted to put up the Google StreetView of my house. Then I realized: from that view, you can easily determine the location of my house. Hmm. I tend to a-hole up way more often than I'd like. I don't want a few million annoyed people on my doorstep. Chose not to put it up.

'Sides, you can see me through the open window getting out of the shower. No one wants to see that !

Heh - Noooo we dont want to see that. Theres enough sillyness on it already... Check these out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/google_moon/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03...tland_welcome/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03...iew_shetlands/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/loch_ness_stig/
El reg doing its usual top job of tracking them like the tech equivalent of Hello magazine...