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...
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.
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
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 ...
The difference is in the length of "surveillance"... if you are putting up a video camera looking at someone else's house, then you are documenting everything about their life and what they do on their property... that is an invasion of privacy.
On the other hand, a single photograph on a single day of someone's private property is _not_ (in my mind) an invasion of privacy... it's just happenstance. You are not systematically documenting someone's life, only getting a single picture at a point in time.
Friedmud
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.
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.