Slashdot Mirror
Google Street View Raises Privacy Concerns
Pcol writes "The New York Times is running a story about a woman who says her cat is clearly visible through the living room window of her second-floor apartment using Street View and that she has contacted Google asking that the photo be removed. 'The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people's lives,' Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview. 'The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.' Wired has started a contest on the most interesting photos found using the new Google Tool that now includes sunbathing coeds, alleged drug deals, and the google van itself. 'I think that this product illustrates a tension between our First Amendment right to document public spaces around us, and the privacy interests people have as they go about their day,' says Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
By protesting that much about a photo, she now has her name and address (not just her cat) blasted all over the web. If she had said nothing, possibly it would have all blown over.
if everyone could see my pussy through a window on the internet.
I'm so sorry, I just couldn't resist it...
Summation 2
fte all, she`s not objecting to people taking her picture, she'`s objecting to people taking her picture inside her house, without her consent, which is the definition of an invasion of privacy.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Many other companies have been doing this for realestate industry for years...
Also, copyright law states (IANAL) that you can take pictures of people in their homes from the street. Only no zooming, and with (I think) a 55mm lens at best. Look up the case law. The only think I think that may be challenged in court is if high res photos at 55mm constitutes some kind of new zoom...
Who cares if I can see your cat or not? If it doesn't matter if I'm walking past your house and see it then why on Earth does it matter if I can see it using my PC? I think the reaction is OTT and irrational. And in regards to the "books on shelves" part - I wouldn't care if they knew what books I was reading. If I did have a book I shouldn't have (whatever that book might be) I would take teh effort to prevent the Government from finding out.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/05/request_f or_urb.html
Your tongues can't repel flavor of that magnitude!
I am wrestling with this. If you can see me, from the street, from a car, for God's sake, then how much expectation of privacy do I really have?
I'm not sure I understand the objections. If I go to a strip club, and I am seen leaving it, well, then, I was a douchebag for not being sneakier about it, if I don't want anybody to know.
Is the problem that the photos are being published on a widely-used web page?
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
It were perfectly reasonable if Google were on her property when the photos were taken (they weren't).
It'd be perfectly reasonable if her blinds were closed (which would lend credence to them 'invading' her privacy)
But it isn't even remotely reasonable because she keeps her blinds open! If you don't want someone to take pictures of you, or see you doing the nasty, or anything else inside your house, close your blinds, otherwise you have no expectation of privacy, either from the government, or from your fellow citizens.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
the pictures show what anyone driving down the street would see. there aren't any privacy concerns because the pictures don't contain anything private- i know this may come as a shock to the mental midget in TFA, but glass is transparent.
this is only news-worthy because it has a couple buzzwords like "google" and "privacy concerns". meanwhile, the people who are actually tapping your phone/internet traffic/watching you continue to perpetrate *horrendous* privacy violations, and nobody cares because of watered-down crap like this. if we're going to be morally outraged by something, let's pick something actually scandalous, m'kay?
I'm rather amazed at how well this actually works....a friend of mine is from Miami. He looked up one of the more destitute areas in the city and sure enough there it was.
We were dying laughing for nearly 10 minutes thinking about a big google van driving through the slums and taking panoramic photos.
Christ we are geeks.
Living With a Nerd
If it's visible from the street, it's public domain. If she has a problem with this, she can invest in some curtains.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
In the '80s, Microsoft was the geek hero, fighting against the big bad IBM. Today, Google takes Microsoft's place, and it's hero in the minds of the current generation of geek.
The main difference is that Microsoft always spoke of itself as a profit-making business. Google pretends to be something "better".
Yes, give it a decade, and of course people will hate Google as much as they hated Microsoft, and it will behave as abusively as Microsoft did during its heyday 5-10 years ago. But I don't want to enjoy the monopolisation of various Internet features, and the other fallout, that comes of its steamrolling in the meanwhile.
What happened to the entrepreneurs like Hewlett, Packard and Olsen, who actually built amazing new stuff to become world leaders? Google haven't done nothing, but the evolutionary step they made to put them where they are even pales in comparison to what Microsoft did for the PC.
I hope his wife isn't checking out this Google Street View.
I live in what has been at times a sketchy neighborhood, and I've talked to the police about putting up a private security camera. Cars have been vandalized, graffiti on sidewalks and buildings, but supposedly the drug house up the road is cleaned up. Not sure if it's state or county law, but I can't point a camera at someone else's private property. I can point it at my property, and I can point it at public property. I cannot record sound, only video.
Check the laws about this sort of thing where you live. If you find a picture going inside your home, you may be able to go after them.
a woman who says her cat is clearly visible through the living room window of her second-floor apartment using Street View Funny... I wonder how come no one complains when the DoT, DoJ and other stupidly acronymed agencies throw cameras on every street corner... Out of sight out of mind for some. No one outside of spectators (those who don't actually see through the camera's lens) knows what these cameras see or record yet they assume based on naive premise "the government would never..." Sure the gov would never, that doesn't mean there couldn't possibly be a pedophile or peeping tom working for the government and seeing into one's private life 24/7.
I wish there could be like true blue public forum based discussions on these matters so people can get a true perspective of reality before wanting their 15 minutes of fame. Would I be mad if Google passed me by on the street while I was scratching my crotch... No. Would I be upset if they filmed my cat? No. Home? No. Would I be mad if it was constant (so called antiterrorism foobar cams)... Yes.
Infiltrated dot Net
The Battery Tunnel in NYC is clearly seen throughout in street view. Its been illegal since 9/11 to take any photos in or on any of the bridges and tunnels of NYC.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
If you look closely at the cat in the picture
You can see the cat looks desperate to get out of the house and away from the crazy lady.
Perhaps we should band up and conduct a rescue raid.
If you have nothing to hide, who cares?
That's almost precisely the same line the Bush administration used to justify residential wiretapping. You're playing with fire there. People should have the right to privacy in their own homes. I say it's okay for Google to photograph a house's exterior, but not the interior.
The UK is just as bad. We refuse to extradite a Russian oligarch to Russia to stand trial on numerous serious charges ranging from fraud to terrorism, then complain when the Russians won't extradite a Russian to us to stand trial for murder. But of course we are the good guys.
Pining for the fjords
That "battle" has only begun, and this is but the first incident.
What's wrong about seeing that old woman's pussy (juvenile crowd, silence please)? You could stand in the street, look up and behold, you would've seen the same. That cute fuzzy thing.
The difference is that you would have to have been THERE, exactly THEN, to behold it. This moment is now frozen forever, for everyone to see.
Now imagine a FF to the not-so-far future, when it becomes technically possible to do such things not only as snapshots, but continuous. Perfect live streams from everywhere to everywhere. Yes, the technology is already here, but I'm talking absolutely ubitiquous. "Google street view" gives you the current live pictures from whatever corner of the world you want to be on.
Kinda scary if you ask me. Stalking's never been easier. It would be trivial to follow a person throughout his or her life.
"Close the blinds" kinda doesn't cut it. Every halfway remotely free country on this planet defines your home as some kind of sanctuary, where even the state can't simply waltz in and do what they please. Here, it's illegal to explicitly spy into the windows of houses you can look into. When you take a picture of a house, you have to get the (written) OK from every single owner of an apartment in the house whose window you might be showing in that picture, if you want to publish the picture.
I'm kinda surprised that no law like this exists in the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...which was yesterday. If anyone had a problem with content for any of the photos they had taken, they would remove it on request.
What they're doing is not illegal, as other posters have pointed out, and they seem pretty receptive to the privacy concerns. Kudos to them for doing something very useful with some sort of conscience.
Overly dramatic much? There is more than a small difference between having a static street level view of an area and having constantly monitored live camera's following your every move.
Offtopic, I know, but "sunbathing coeds"? As in "sunbathing students of both genders" or as in "sunbathing women"? Why do we refer to women like they're anomalies at academic institutions?
At my school, we have something like 60% women... should we call men "co-eds"?
Go ahead, mod me down as offtopic, but this kind of thing irks me.
the attitudes in the posts here reveal the prejudices and stereotypes of the usual slashbot
namely:
1. government baaad
2. google gooood
i was just reading the comments under the story about anti-forensic disk tools and the level of paranoia about a hypothetical situation involving disk access by the government was everywhere. and all around was an evisceration of the 'if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide' attitude
and then, bam, you turn around and read this story, and 'if you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to hide' is a synopsis of the attitude of a lot the posters!
dear slashbots: your prejudices are showing. what you need to do is pick an ideological position on privacy, and apply it equally to google and the government. because when you use a double standard on privacy in regards to a darling internet company versus the bad ol usa government, you are revealing some pretty flimsy stereotypes and prejudices on your part
in fact, you could make the case for worrying about google more than the government. given the legal bonds that tie the hands of the government, usually populated by incompetent bureaucrats, as opposed to what the highly competitive cutthroat corporate business environment might drive its employees who are caltech and MIT and stanford PhDs in their field to do, i might worry a whole HELL of a lot more about what google is doing with my privacy than the usa
one would hope some of you would aspire to be a little less transparent and hypocritical and shallow and see-through in your beliefs. on the issue of privacy, you better upgrade your attitude of the us government to that of your attitude towards google, or downgrade your attitude of google to match your attitude towards the us government. but overly excusing google and overly indemnifying the us government is not an intellectually or morally coherent position for many of you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But that's precisely the problem here: her interior is visible from the exterior.
To put it in perspective, my family has a home at the beach. My mom bought a large picturesque window for the front so they could look at the beach. It also happens to be by the TV. So, anytime people are watching the TV inside, people outside can look in.
My mom complains about this all the time. "It's late at night. People are relaxing while watching TV. Why do they have to look in?" My response is always the same: "Why did you put the window up?"
People have a right to privacy, but if they're "flaunting" their interior with windows and no curtains, how far does Google have to go to ensure their privacy? Same thing with my family's home. It's a nice house. Should we be up in arms when passersby take pictures of it? Should we freak out that they're potentially taking pictures of us watching TV?
The answer, like most things in life, is simple: put up curtains.
And that will be the end of google views.
Best Slashdot Co
Is a moving target.
You've got a right to privacy anywhere you've got a reasonable expectation of it.
Nude sunbathing behind a privacy fence means that you don't expect your neighbor's 15-year old son to get out his dad's stepladder.
As soon as someone convinces a judge that people have reasonable expectation that satellite images of their nekkidness are going to be publicly available, that "reasonable expectation of privacy" goes away.
If this hasn't happened yet, it will soon.
Same thing with the street images.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The US concept of privacy is an aberration. Should we strive for it? Yes, but we shouldn't expect it to last.
For centuries, families have lived in squalid one bedroom homes where the entire family slept and did other things in the same bed. Everyone knew everyone's business. When the founding fathers thought of privacy they were thinking of the privileged.
I think it is extremely silly to expect privacy to last.
we are living in an age where the average person can get equipment to see through walls, record conversations or videos, and do background/financial checks from their desk.
Two things are going to happen....some people are going to be annoyed by what they see and want to stamp it out....and some people are going to say 'so what? I saw something like that last week.'
The real question is when the offended person tries stamp out the activity are you going to defend it even if you don't do it?
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Well she doesn't want a pretty low res picture of her cat in Street View but has a high-res picture of her, her cat and the room on the nytimes.com ...
Feel free to exercise your right to privacy - close your drapes.
possibly coerce you and keep you in line and maintain their own existing power-base if they don't implement such measures.
It is an old saying, but I'm sure we've all heard it before: "When we are afraid, we will do anything to feel safer." So the Government that is afraid that it is losing it's grip will force the People to live in fear.
Sure you don't always think of the fact that you're afraid, but when's the last time you were on an open stretch of highway and just wanted to have a brief moment of the exhiliration that you see portrayed on film of speeding and pushing you car to the limit, or when have you ever wanted to climb to the top of a skyscraper just to see the view?
Granted the greater good is maintained when you don't run 120mph down the road, and surely you cannot fall to your death if you are not allowed to be in the open air at 1200ft. But when it's just you, and there is obviously no one else around, can not be anyone else around, why couldn't you go 120mph? It's your car. You fund the highway.
Now here come the nay-sayers to claim that there must be law maintained so you cannot go over the speed limit. Here come those who claim that my speeding is killing the environment. Here is my tormentor who claims that the wind must surely blow me to my death. There are those who claim that surely I will injure someone, or cause grief to come upon my family if I die.
I do not deny these facts, but I also do not deny that I am more than capable of handling my car at 120mph on a flat stretch of road, and am capable of doing slight corners at well over 90mph. Many rally-car drivers do it daily. And no, I do not own a rally-car, nor do I think I do. I am aware of reality.
I do not deny that I would not want to fall 1200ft to my death. I do not argue that indeed I am afraid of heights that tall. But I do know that the wind in my face is great, and that the view from the top of a mountain is spectacular, so why would the view of man's great accomplishment be any less spectacular? And what if I want to be on the open, upper-layers to admire the spectacular building adornments that the architects designed into the building?
But would any police officer understand your plea of unbridled passion for life if he witnessed your speeding? Would any security officer share your passion of witnessing the majestic glory of what Man can accomplish?
So until the Government can remember that we are not all bodies politic, and instead that we are people with emotions, and not just People, then, no, the Government cannot allow us to feel that we are do any sense of privacy.
We must not stand by and idly allow our freedoms to be taken from us. I can understand the need to protect the people, but as Ben Franklin so aptly stated: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." I agree with the sentiment. I don't see how any self-aware man cannot agree. I am not for the disarming of the military, but I am for the reduction of Government on a Federal level. It is to the State to preserve the rights of the individuals who live within its borders. It is to the Federal Government to preserve the authority of contracts between states and to defend the common borders.
We've all had the history classes, but who amongst us still believes that the Government should be for the People, and of the People? Obviously not those who run the so-called Government, nor those who sit at the head of the Corporations which control the Government.
I have gone on long enough with this short rant, so if you wish to tear this apart, go ahead, and I'll respond in like.
I know my position and I am not afraid to defend it, nor to redefine it with new information learned. I know myself.
I am for the death penalty, but I am against death row. I am for capital punishment, but I believe that any punishment must be decided upon by a jury, and any proceedings against the accused must start
2^3 * 31 * 647
A true statement and a valid point, but there's a piece missing from the "walking down the street" analogy that seems to be eluding most of us. When a person walks down the street and looks into a home through a street-facing window, it's extremely unlikely that the window is actually a one-way mirror that only allows viewing in. So yes, they can see what's inside, but anyone inside can also see them. Stop and think about that for a moment, because it's a natural check-and-balance mechanism that, in my opinion, should not be left out of these sorts of privacy discussions: While you can't deny other people the right to look at you in public without your permission, it's only fair that you get to look at them at the same time. If nothing else, it's reasonable to at least have the opportunity to know who is looking.
But with Google Street View, or the Zaio Corp. database, or any similar endeavor, you don't get that courtesy. Even if you were lucky enough to spot the camera in the ten to fifteen seconds it was visible, you still don't know how many millions of people just looked into your life at that moment. And don't forget this is Google we're talking about: among other things, the new background checker for lazy hiring managers, who naturally have your home address at the top of your résumé. Suddenly anyone who lives in a Street View-covered area had better:
For the record, I like Street View. I've been hoping Google would add something like that for some time. But don't gloss over the privacy concerns by equating walking down the street and looking through a window with driving a van down hundreds of streets taking millions of photographs and associating them with street addresses on the world's largest search engine. Only one of these makes your private life public, and it's not the first one.
Pull up the NYTimes article and actually look at the image the woman is complaining about. Tell me that if you were not already looking for a cat, you would have noticed it. Then tell me that this isn't simply someone making a tempest in a teapot.
I understand, really I do. Now that Google is no longer purely the "Underdog" it's popular to point out every potential path it can take down the 'Dark Side" as a de facto "they are going to do this next!". We've been burnt in the past, and project our fears of every bad corporation (real or fictional) we've ever read about onto them. But come on, this isn't even remotely the same as Britain's Big Brother system. We are talking about a van that drove through an area one and took pictures of publicly visible objects, not a series of surveillance equipment designed setup to ensure every action you take is recorded for prosperity.
You know that brings up an interesting thought. What if someone hangs a 2A0 goatse picture on their wall, or is sitting in the living room jacking off to girls gone wild (thinking about the co-ed discussion further back). Google comes along and shoots it in the street view. So now we can zoom in and see this. Where does this fall?
1) Invasion of privacy
2) Distribution of pr0n by google
3) Public obscenity by the person who's house it is?
(/. caveat:- If you don't like the examples please insert your own, my point is about the various ways of looking at the implications of the situation)
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
If she wants privacy shouldn't she just buy nice curtains, instead of bitch about her cat's exposure over the internet ?
Next week's News flash :
Government to put an addendum in DCMA declaring curtains as an illegal method of circumvention of public anti-terrorist spy surveying. Think of the children.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Sheesh, The Transparent Society came out nearly 10 years ago, Earth was published in 1990, and some of the same themes show up in Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Professor Steve Mann took this further and developed a series of Wearcams through the '90s.
Anyone who hasn't been anticipating this for at least the past decade, if not longer, has some remedial reading ahead of them.
I was gonna look at you, but then I changed my mind after I found out that stealing bandwidth made the baby Jesus cry. You monster. :-(
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
You're the dolt, but thanks for falling victim to your own logic. There are two parts to your probability estimation, it's called Risk Management. We assign weights to the outcomes as well as their probabilities. So while it may be unlikely that event A happens, if the failure is catastrophic then we assign it a higher weight in determining a response. So it's more likely google will cause you some harm by invading your privacy, but the harm is likely to be minor. Whereas it *may* (and I'll get to this in a moment) be less likely that the government causes you some harm through an invasion of privacy, the potential harm is many times greater, thus it is to be avoided.
In addition one must consider the scale of the two entities here, one is a corporation that can only collect information on you if you interact with it in some way. If you don't use google or google products then you are many many times less likely to even be in their databases. This is not so with the government, participation with them is MANDATORY. You must register as a citizen, pay taxes (income, sales, property, etc), as well as licensing for various activities like driving or owning a gun. So we see that google's footprint in your daily life is tiny compared to the government which you come into contact with every day in many many ways. Additionally government data is shared among many institutions and affects everything from your ability to vote, to holding a job, being allowed to drive or travel, or even in some cases it can affect one's ability to live in certain areas. Merely a few examples of how a government record can affect one's day to day life much more profoundly than data residing on google servers.
The government also is not a static entity, and history has taught us time and again throughout all cultures that unchecked a government will strive to increase its own power and control over a populace. While recent US administrations may have been "nice" there is no guarantee that future ones will continue to respect the rights of the people. The point is that the government has the TOOLS the MEANS and the MANPOWER to affect ones life in many more ways, at many more places, and with much greater effect than anything google could ever hope to achieve short of google becoming a government-sized entity in and of itself.
Note that I am NOT saying the sky is falling here. Interesting that your reaction to people arguing against your baseless claims is for you to respond that we are UFO nuts who are afraid of sharks. Wow, great fucking logic. I am NOT afraid of some stupid Hollywood men in black scenario, or some shadowy CIA agent targeting me as the fall-guy for some elaborate government scheme. It doesn't have to be that nefarious or complicated or unlikely an event for the government to completely mess up one's life. Want some day to day examples? How about the TSA no-fly list. How many innocent civilians are restricted from flying, or at the very least must undergo hours of interrogations every time they want to travel simply because their name or birth date is *similar* to some suspected terrorist name on the list. This happens hundreds of times every day across the country. Similar lists are also coming into use, like no-sell lists for sensitive equipment or chemicals/fertilizers, or even one state recently (can't recall which) that proposed a no-gun-sale list. All of these lists lack any sort of oversight committee that provides a way for ordinary citizens to have the information corrected or their names removed after presenting evidence that they aren't terrorists. And in the case of the no-gun sale list there was no due process for having one's name placed on the list! That means that someone's second amendment rights could be removed without due process. So people are stuck with large inconveniences or just plain can't use those services. That's just one example. How about an unpaid traffic ticket? Or lost vehicle registration renewal? Just this month my girlfriend's brother was in an minor accident and the respo
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --