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.'"
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
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.
Folks across the pond seem to trust only the state with cameras these days.
Well, you're expecting them to be consistent in their paranoia.
After all, their government has been spying on them considerably more than Google, and it's Google they run out of town?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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 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.
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.
> "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.
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....
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.
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!
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.
...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.