Privacy and Google maps

Google Street View Scares

by Rupert Sharp
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 16 Oct 2007

Another 'don't let them get me' article I'm afraid but this one with a slightly more sinister grip. Google's newest map toy threatens people-privacy right to the very core, it's called Street View and they're not afraid to use it. Google maps and Google Earth have always been a bit 'wooah' since you can see the top of your house, your local and your workplace from space but how about peering through your windows as well?

Street View makes privacy a thing of the past, a van with a silly shaped camera on the top flies around a city and takes 360* pictures of the streets it goes down including the shops, cars and ultimately people, indexing them just like websites. There are now sites dedicated to these photo's where people are seen picking their noses, tripping over and arguing in the street; this is just too personal for my taste and quite frankly freaks me out. Currently only about 15 cities in America are heavily indexed but Google is constantly talking of expansion around the place and unfortunately even over here in the U.K., I hope to the great tea cake in the sky it doesn't. The personal security issues of these images are far too great for them to be justified. Yes some people would find Street View fun and entertaining just as they did with Google maps, being able to see things up close and personal in places you've never been to but other people would find it a gold mine of information to do a lot more sinister things. People's facial features are in some photos perfectly clear and identifiable and could probably be used to track someone's position, but things like license plates on vehicles are also quite clear to see, which could be used for all sorts.

How would you like to have your colleagues start slipping you links to photos of yourself leaving an adult video store? or falling headfirst into the pavement? The possibilities are endless, Google covers its rear with a statement that if you find any imagery that is inappropriate or contains your image you can have it removed, that's all very well if you’re the kind of person who is quite happy to trawl through tens of thousands of images in multiple cities that you have visited or lived in to find one with you in it, but for us normal homo-sapiens with only one life to live we don't have the time. Personally I think it's outrageous that there hasn't been more of an uproar about it, people aren't getting the information and freedom to allow or disallow their image being shown on the maps. Conspiracy theorists eat your heart out.

Another quick bit of news about Google maps, it has recently been made available for mobile operating system Symbian, the version promises the ability to use GPS and have better support for Nokia devices. Gmail 1.5 is also available for the mobile phone.