Slashdot Mirror
Angry Villagers Run Google Out of Town
Barence writes "A Google Street View car has been chased out of a British village by angry residents. The car was taking photographs of Broughton in Buckinghamshire for Google's when it was spotted by a local resident who warned the car not to enter the village then roused his neighbors, who surrounded the vehicle until the driver performed a U-turn and left. 'This is an affluent area,' protester Paul Jacobs said. 'We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.'"
Given the shape of popular british paranoia these days, I would have expected the google car to be identified as an agent of the paedophiles and run out of town for that reason...
So instead they got media coverage about how they are affluent and easy targets for burglars?
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
Don't want to have people seeing your private shit? Don't keep it out in the open, in public view.
Don't want interlopers driving through your community? Make it gated and pay for your own maintenance instead of expecting the local government to take care of it for you.
yeah, because things visible from public roads are private.....give me a break like seeing street view pictures of houses is going to make you more likely to be burglarized? News Flash anything visible from a public road is not private.... sorry for being redundant but this is basic shit here people
I didn't realize that public roads were your private shit.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Rule #1 is:
Security through obscurity isn't.
Rule #2 is: Making a huge stink about your private neighborhood against a well-liked company like Google will probably mean you're going to get a lot more attention than if you just let well enough alone.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
really? Besides the liability you would incur by having a driver continue into an angry mob, why would you have them risk their lives?
AN angry mob can flip a car, break windows, flatten tires.
Escalation in this scenario is NOT the wise thing to do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or they can just come back in a couple days and do it again, hassle avoided.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
What you want? Is that how you measure the regulation of public space? Ya know, there's people in this world who don't want womens' faces to be visible in public. Should we accommodate their wants too? The thing about public spaces is that they are public. This means that everyone is allowed to go there and exercise freedom. Freedoms like taking pictures, and putting them on the Internet, if that's what they want to do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I didn't realize that public roads were your private shit.
Were they really taking pictures of the public road?
Folks across the pond seem to trust only the state with cameras these days.
It is not at all clear that Google is breaking no laws.
Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
The latest King Kong flick had a note in the credits that the had licensed the image of the Empire State Building.
Architects sometimes try (and succeed) in protecting their creations.
And Google is in it for the money - they use these photos to gain more click data and to sell more ads. Google is not some innocent taking a few snapshots.
So don't jump too quickly to the conclusion that Google isn't violating some of the property owners rights.
Privacy isn't all or nothing, it's a matter of respecting other people's wishes. There are more social rules in public places than there are in private - it's not a free-for-all where you should upset other people to the bleeding edge of what the law says is permissible. These people don't want their houses on Street View, whether you are fine with your house being on Street View is irrelevant.
And they aren't "idiots" - as somebody has tagged the story - they are just normal people. There's a staggering lack of respect for other people's wishes being shown in the comments here.
Don't want to have people seeing your private shit? Don't keep it out in the open, in public view.
Or perhaps we could develop a social contract that balances things private and public so that I don't have to hide my stuff in a bunker in order to insure you don't feel you have a right to put pictures of it on the internet in a massive geo-tagged database you make available for your private commercial gain.
Don't want interlopers driving through your community?
I'm happy to allow tourists to drive through my community. I don't even mind if they take a few pictures, I don't even mind if they pop them up on their vacation blog.
I don't see why that should mean I should be happy to allow someone to systematically photograph every single part of my community visible from a public vantage point, and then upload it to the internet though.
Why can't we reach an understanding where its perfectly ok to take a few private photographs, but completely unacceptable to systematically photograph everyone/everthing and upload it into a for profit geo-tagged database?
They took a stand and 'Called the police.'
That's hardly a 'stand.'
'Taking a stand' would be tarring and feathering their local district attorney equivalent and their MP's until their right to
shoot burglars dead is once again respected by English law.
Burglaries will be sorted out after a few burglars end up dead for their efforts.
Take a stand and kill a crook. Take a stand and slap around your local DA to de facto respect the notion that a man's home is his castle. Take a stand and slap around your politicians until they recognize what nature teaches: That every living thing has a right to defend themselves, their friends, their family, and their home.
Being a crook isn't a legitimate career choice. It should carry a great deal more risk than it currently does in jolly ol' Britain.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
They are idiots, unless Britain has a law that things visible from the public streets aren't permissible to photograph.
Obviously, in the US this would be plainly moronic, since it is, indeed, the case, that in public there is no expectation of privacy.
It has been extremely well established that if your copyrighted (sign, building, whatever) is viewable from a public place, then an image taken from that public place does not infringe. Period.
If the hollywood sign people really are doing that then they would get their asses handed to them if it went to court.
The King Kong movie is probably more questionable, since I'm guessing at some point a computer model was made of the building.
IANAL, but anything plainly viewable from public property is not considered private.
Agreed. However there should be a distinction between "seeing something from public property" and "systematically capturing a complete record of everything that can be seen from public property and uploading it into a for profit geo tagged database".
Its the same polite distinction we use with the 'have a penny / take a penny jar'. Its perfectly socially acceptable to grab a penny or two to round out the change in a purchase from this spare change. Its completely socially unacceptable to systematically go to each establishment and take all their 'spare change' once a week.
They were only taking picture of light that was over the public road. Cameras don't reach out and take things.
By that logic, standing in a bucket truck filming the children changing for bed between the slats in their blinds with a telephoto lens and uploading it to the internet isn't at all an invasion of privacy either.
Yup - and, you know what? It's horrible.
I'm resigned to the fact that my face is going to turn up in the background of maybe hundreds of tourist photos and videos, being as I live in Oxford which is Tourist Central at this time of year. Regardless of what I'm doing, whether I'm hungover in my sweats and going to the corner shop for a pint of milk, or out on a date, or on my way to work. If I'm unlucky, I'm on my way to a formal dinner and wearing my academic robes. Then I'm not in the background - they're actually taking pictures directly of me. There are nine years of photos out there of me trying to look nondescript or putting on my "piss off you bastard with the camera" face. Okay, I know none of the people who see those photos is likely ever to recognise me - but it still feels like an invasion of privacy. And yes, if I don't want my "privacy" invaded in that way I should lock myself in a bunker. But can you not understand why it's annoying, even if it's not actually illegal or even immoral?
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I don't know how privacy laws work in England, but in the US the concept of "Reasonable Expectation of Privacy" exists. What I can see of your house from the street is NOT private. It's public. If you don't want people to see your house, you better build a big fence, or some other method of exhibiting a particularly strong interest in visual privacy. Otherwise your front lawn should be free game. This concept provides a distinction between Street View and peeping toms. It's not reasonable to expect that nobody will see your house when it is in plain view, but if you close your blinds, you can reasonably expect that people aren't going to go to extra measures to see inside. If they do, you have a legitimate privacy complaint, because you put up a barrier that prevents casual observation of the inside of your house that had to be circumvented to some degree.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Because a few vacation photos, over a hundred tourists, equates to the same thing.
Except that it doesn't equate to the same thing at all.
100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.
Because I'd like to see where I'm going when I plan my tourist trip.
And you need a complete step-by-step photo walkthru down every residential side street? I can see the value of google street view for finding a business; and given the choice, most of them will opt in to such a system. But why do you need a photo of every residence in the city?
Besides If you are visiting someone, and their house is THAT hard to find, then they can send you a picture.
Because it really isn't harming you.
That's an argument usually put forth by those who don't understand the value of politeness and good manners.
But not illegal.
Its pretty sad that 'acceptable behaviour' is defined by 'is it legal?'.
But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us people will be happy to pass a law. The books are full of stupid laws trying to regulate asshat behaviour.
> "Your freedom ends where someone else's nose begins" is an old English concept.
Whereas the new English concept would appear to be "Your freedom ends where your nose ends." Or maybe a bit before.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... you make available for your private commercial gain.
You are implying Google is making money at everyone's expense here, and is the only one benefitting. That's funny, because the only reason what Google is doing has commercial value at all is that *that's what massive numbers of people actually want and find useful*. Apparently the majority of people do ultimately want such information about the entire world easily and readily available, otherwise Google wouldn't make much money at all. People bitch when its their own house being photographed, but I don't hear anybody bitching when they're using it for directions and to help find their way in a foreign neighbourhood etc. What everybody basically wants is the entire world in there except their own little neck of the woods. You can see this doesn't make sense.
Guess what. I can get the PLANS to your home and everything else I want by paying a small fee at the city hall or county offices.
It's amazing what I can get about your home from public records.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Um, the Google camera that drove past my house was 3m off the road (notice that it's on a pole on top of a car). So it sees over the fence and right into my daughter's bedroom. A person on the road with a ladder and a camera perving into windows and posting the results on the Internet would have been arrested. Apparently it's OK when done by a multinational corporation.
I like how this is happening in ENGLAND of all places. How many CC cameras are there per block in London? Some ridiculous number? Where is the outrage over that???
Stop reading the Daily Mail. Seriously.
You do have a right of self defence. You don't have the right to kill someone. That's not defence that's murder, and you'd rightly be put away for a long time for it.
You also have the power of arrest, provided you have reasonable suspicion of an indictable offence (Trespassing isn't, btw. that's a civil offence).
1. photographing in a public place is NOT illegal
2. theives don't use google to find victims - they find people who don't secure their homes properly by casing the property
3. if these residents secured their properties properly, they wouldn't have been broken into.
people crying over google street view are just knuckle draggers who don't understand the technology and remind me of monkeys grunting at fire like it's the first time they've seen it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If you shoot someone breaking into your house with you there, it's probably not murder.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
If I take pictures of the family in my yard, the neighbors can't object to the fact that their houses might be in the photo.
In your case you are the owner of the property that is in the picture, you have a legitimate claim on the right to take the photo. Your neighbors' worry may be real, but their property is not the main subject of the photo. Besides a single image is not going to provide burglars with enough information - as opposed to cataloged, continuous series of images on StreetView.
Google, on the other hand, takes pictures of homes and property in which it has not a gram of ownership or any other legal claim. It's true that public space is relatively free for all, but it's still not OK to set up a telescope on a public sidewalk and look into peoples' windows, and it's not OK to follow someone on public streets for hours and days...
It is an entirely legitimate desire not to have your home's photo on Google.
It's also an entirely legitimate desire to want to be able to take photos in public.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So what about tourists taking photos on vacation? Do they have the right to take photos of interesting buildings?
Suppose Google Maps solicited private photos rather than taking the photos themselves. Woudl that make a difference? It would certainly make it impossible to drive Google photographers out of town since tourists might be able to make a little extra money photographing streets for Google.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think you just accidentally made one of the better arguments I've heard for not allowing every moron with a hundred quid and a letter certifying them as 'sane' to have a gun.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You don't really know how burglars case a house, do you? Can you tell what time people show up? Can you work out their routines so you know the best time to rob the place? This does *not* make it any easier for a burglar to rob any house unless they have a bunch of valuable stuff lying in their yard unattended, in which case, it's going to disappear whether its on Google Maps or not.
So I take it you have burglaries all sorted in the US?
Comparatively speaking, Yes.
FBI Crime Statistics
Home Office Crime Report for 2005/2006
Take a look at page 115 of the home office report. Chapter 7.4.
Let's use the Rural numbers, just for fun. They're lower.
Percentage victims once or more
All burglary: 2%
All Vehicle Theft: 4%
All Violence: 2%
Now compare it to the United States FBI report:
2005, violent crime rate: 469.2 per 100,000 people (equivalent to less than or equal to 0.462%, per UK standards)
Burglary: 726.7 per 100,000 (equivalent or = 0.7267 %)
Motor Vehicle Theft: 416.7 per 100,000 ( = 0.4167%)
Notice also that the FBI counts discrete events of crimes, where as the Home Office will only count you once if you get robbed, beat up, or stolen from multiple times per year. In essence, the Home Office method is a clear attempt to reduce crime statistics by any defendable method.
You are at least 4 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in the UK.
You are at about ten times more likely to have your car stolen in the UK.
You are about three times more likely to have your home robbed in the UK.
I invite you to poke around the official numbers for both the US and the UK and make a counter argument.
My argument is this: Offering violence to criminals reduces their numbers.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Stupidity gets ridiculed.
It seems that every other day we get another Orwellian story about England and their newest ability to watch their citizens with cameras or step on their rights by database miss uses, and THIS is what they take a stand over? Google streetview?
yeah. ridicule deserved.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
In the US, you have a right to take pictures of anything you can see from a public street. I suspect it is similar in the UK or else Google wouldn't be doing Street View there.
On the other hand, surrounding other people's cars and interfering with their passage through public streets may constitute a crime.
I think you're being a little unfair here. I've known a few people who have taken very careful measures to ensure their house was safe against burglars but still wound up having it broken into. Keep in mind, too, that not everyone can afford alarms, bars on every window, and so forth.
The problem with burglary is the burglar. This argument is the same ridiculous one used in sexual assault cases where the defense suggests that the woman was "asking for it." I won't let that fly.
He who has no
ou can't get that kind of rich without being a crook, and every one of them are.
Care to tell us who JK Rowling stole from? How about David Beckham? George Lucas has done OK, who did he rip off?
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
George Lucas has done OK, who did he rip off?
The movie-going public?
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I don't see why someone should follow your special rules because you've arbitrarily deemed it to be polite.
They're not "his special" rules; they're actually fairly common and well-understood. (Or at least, were at one time. Maybe there's a generational gap here? I don't consider myself an old fogy at 31, but...)
You give absolutely no reason except that "they don't get it." If they don't understand, please explain it. Why is it not polite to do so? and don't just say, "because I don't want it." I want real reasons.
One aspect of politeness is voluntarily refraining from an act which disturbs others, even if you don't agree that it should disturb them (or even understand why it does). Thus, "because I don't want it" is ipso facto a valid reason for stating that an act is impolite.
As to why the OP doesn't like it, I can't answer that myself, of course. But in general, social rules exist to help society function -- that is, to help people come together as a cohesive unit for the good of all. Now, the Internet may be encouraging a new set of social rules which (like Street View) give openness and visibility a higher priority; but even if you subscribe to such a "new world order", that doesn't make it any less impolite to violate others' pre-established social rules. And if you simply didn't know about them, then the polite response is to say either "I'm sorry, I didn't know and won't do that again" or "let's discuss whether those rules are appropriate", not to blithely ignore them and continue with your own ways.
...as people who protected their neighborhood...
"Protecting their neighborhood" by restricting the use of public roads by certain private citizens who are doing nothing illegal, but - for whatever reasons - they (the neighborhood folk) decided they just don't like. Mob rule FTW!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
The local called the police according to the article, but there's no mention of them actually turning up. Presumably they just laughed at him. Disappointing, given that the villagers were engaging in behaviour that gets protesters arrested at Faslane on a semi-regular basis.
They are idiots. They got uppity about their obscure little village appearing on Google Street View (where it would be no less obscure), but were quite happy to give an interview to the Times about their 'affluent area'.
You never know. Maybe burglars will be scared off once images of the angry mob appear on Street View.
Yes, you do have the right to photograph from a public place, BUT what Google is doing with the photographs it takes demonstrates a problem with that right. The concept of being able to take pictures from a public place was not conceived with the knowledge that someone, let alone a company, would drive up and down every street with the intention of photographing every house an posting the images on the internet for the world to see.
The residents were absolutely correct in making Google leave. 'Street View' basically provides a virtual shopping mall for criminals looking to scout out new targets.
Crooks can gather *ALOT* of valuable information from such photographs:
1: Location.
2: Neighboring buildings.
3: Surrounding environment.
4: A rough building floorplan.
5: Points of entry.
6: Points of exit.
7: Possible escape routes away from the scene.
8: Economic status of the resident.
9: Vantage points where neighbors might detect them.
10: Pets (Number, type, and locations).
11: Observation points where the criminal can observe residents activity.
12: Hiding spots.
13: Obstacles to entry.
14: Obstacles to escape.
15: What kind of valuables might be present.
16: Likelihood of passers-by who might see them.
Any criminal can use this information to *GREATLY* increase their chances of a successful robbery.
Unfortunately, civil rights nutjobs will defend their right to photograph in public, but will crucify law abiding people if they shoot a criminal while he is trying to rob a house.
Laws like this make life easier for criminals, and harder for the rest of use who choose to defend ourselves from crime.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Which is why you need guns. If you can't count on the police to help you, then you have to choice but to defend yourself. That's a basic human right and closely-tied to the ownership of your body (protect your property from criminals) and the right to life.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>Americans are generally more trusting of corporations, less trusting of government.
That's because the corporations don't have the power to (a) steal money directly from my wallet or (b) send me to jail if I refuse to pay or (c) use an involuntary military draft to make me die in some shithole in Vietnam or Iraq. Corporations also offer choice. Hate GM? Buy from one of the dozens of other car makers instead. Hate the government school because it's falling-apart and doesn't teach anything? Tough.
Yes corporations are bad, but not as bad as the Uncle Sam Monopoly that uses threats/force against the People.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall