There's a lot to be said for Street View. I've wanted something like this to exist ever since I realised that the Encarta '95 globe barely let you zoom in at all. I wanted full zoom on the world! And Google, via Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View, have pulled this off - finally - to an impressive degree.
There are concerns, however, that these technologies, especially Street View, invade people's privacy. Street View photos are automatically post-processed to blur faces and car license plates, in order to combat this alleged invasion, but this processing is not always successful, as an instance I noticed today proves.
Still, I'm not convinced that the privacy implications are as great as have been claimed. There's nothing the Street View car can see on its travels that any passerby wouldn't also have the opportunity to see. In other words, what it photographs is already in public - and therefore is not private information.
In fact, I think the publication of satellite or high-altitude reconnaissance photos - which are available, for instance, via Google Earth and Google Maps - is, from a privacy point of view, of greater concern, simply because historically, measures to protect privacy have tended to involve obscuring private areas from public view or hearing. Since that public was at ground level, the measures usually ran to walls, fences or hedges - or, if you could afford one, a large garden. None of these measures, although they may have worked for millenia to separate private areas from the senses of the ground level public, fare terribly well in the era of the satellite photograph, because the satellites can see what's behind those walls, hedges and gardens (as the government departments are all too aware!).
So, what's the solution? Should we just accept that we have zero privacy anyway
and get over it? Or should we be building canopies as well as walls, to isolate our private spaces from viewers above as well as beside them?
Another face-blurring fail, just around the corner from the last one. Presumably, since this is the first time I’ve looked for such fails, the fact that I’ve found two in such close proximity suggests that there are vast numbers of them. Not that I’m convinced it matters
Google has been banned from expanding Street View to Greece, over privacy concerns, despite the fact that it is legal to take photographs in public places.
The justification for the ban appears to focus on the fact that Street View is comprehensive and systematic. This would suggest that while people putting the odd holiday snap online would be unproblematic for the Greek legislature, systematic aggregations of photos into comprehensive coverage – the sort of thing that Microsoft’s Photosynth is attempting, for instance – might not be allowed. What’s interesting about this is that the Greek legislature doesn’t seem to be clearly stating just where it considers the line in the sand to be: it seems to want to assess, on a case-by-case basis, which side of the line a given initiative lies.
This is, I think, in the long run not likely to be successful, simply because it is not scalable. There are only so many legislators, and besides, having too many individuals arbitrating without clear guidelines would surely lead to inconsistent judgements.
To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of Google’s approach is the assumption that face-blurring provides acceptable anonymity. I think many people are identifiable by dress, posture, body type, skin and hair colour, and so on – even if their faces are not visible.
I wonder what the basis for Google’s assumption is. Has Google carried out an analysis that shows the vast majority of people cannot identify other people without seeing their faces, for instance? It would behoove Google to publish this research, if indeed it has carried it out – and otherwise to explain why it drew its own line in the sand at face-blurring.