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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.'"
I was driving close to the Googleplex the other day and spotted what I thought was one of those infernal google camera cars, so I drove up next to it and stared, holding a bizarre contorted face for as long as possible. Turns out it was just Google security. Sorry security man, I thought I could be famous....
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
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.
"This is an affluent area. 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."
An affluent area hey? Thanks for the info.
-Burglars.
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
That's nothing just wait until I finish my iBurgle application for the iPhone which automatically scans google's database and directs you the nearest rich persons house!
"I only speak the truth"
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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
Honestly, all they had to do to get him to leave was offer food.
"I only speak the truth"
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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.
I think the obvious solution here is to equip Google cars with sharks. I don't care how angry your mob is, lets see it mess with a shark.
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!
So the bizarre flashmob of angry residents barricades a public road and illegally blocks Google from taking photos from the public streets? This is in the UK... those people are already putting up with a billion cameras, what's one more?
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Yeah but think of the publicity Google gets having street view with a mob in it. I'd check it out. If the group followed the van for a few hours it would be amazing. The whole village would look like it has thousands and thousands of people constantly screaming. And all the faces would be blurred adding to the scary feel. Village of the faceless screaming hicks? Maybe not the same ring as night of the living dead but still.
I hope you die (Sorry if that possibly sounded a little harsh).
Nah, it's totally cool. And an eternity in hell back atya, buddy.
BTW, did you know you can actually edit the shit you write before you post it, in case you go, say, completely over the top?
this is england, i hear there is proposed legislation that would create a government position to wipe citizens asses, they say it's too dangerous to let people do it themselves as they may get paper cuts from the toilet paper. california legislators say this is landmark legislation and are considering introducing it here.
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?
The Streisand Effect should be banned!
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.
I think you mean the league of gentlemen
The lack of respect being shown isn't for their 'wishes' it's a lack of respect for how they choose to enact the fullfillment of those wishes.
They were idiots, they may be normal people. That's OK, normal people can be idiots too. But they were idiots. A small group of people made a decision for the entire community. They probably broke the law by impeding traffic, and all for what? Because they didn't want their homes to show up on Google? They could have just logged in and actually indicated that.
It's not as if Google doesn't pull photos all the time from Streetview due to people requesting it.
And this BS about 'being worried this would attract burglers'. Come the eff on. No one but the locals knew about your place. And the locals already had plenty of ways of casing your joint without Google. In fact, the ones that were responsible for the six burglies in the article not only managed to do it without Google Streetview, but it's likely they got away with it right under the resident's nose.
But now, everyone in a huge radius knows that this place not only is an easy mark (after all they've been knocked over six times already) but there's still stuff left for the taking since people are paraniod about who is coming through.
anyone up for a multi-thousand pound Burglary? first we'll go in and case the homes; taking pictures and posting them in a public location so as to not draw attention to ourselves......
They will be coming for you next for put stuff like the following online:
http://www.homes24.co.uk/property/search/?ps_type=1&loc=Aylesbury&prop_type=&min_price=0&max_price=0&min_bedrooms=0&keywords=&maxdist=0&age=-
I wonder how posting full price info, detailed descriptions of the home, exterior *and* interior photos is less revealing than driving down the street with a camera mounted on the car. I suppose the xenophobia response doesn't get triggered when it's members of the local community that engage in privacy-violating activities.
It's not as if Google doesn't pull photos all the time from Streetview due to people requesting it.
I've made repeated requests to Google to pull a couple of images of my property from streetview, and they've been ignored for a year now-- both by email and by the 'report inappropriate image' option.
So despite Google's overtures to the contrary, I don't think they yank anything unless they are sued.
Might scare off the burglars, too.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Considering the explosion of surveillance in British cities, I'd think they've made it clear they don't expect any privacy in public. I fail to see how living in an "affluent area" allows you some extra privacy rights others do not have.
But hey, I guess rich people really feel like they're entitled to special treatment. You'd think having the money would be enough.
> "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.
Of course it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0389_0347_ZS.html
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-8508.ZO.html
The only difference being that it is not a government organization, but that's kind of besides the point.
not that the uproar over this is any less silly, but if you're going to mock the outrage, at least properly mock it. I wonder if this angry mob was caught on CCTV?
the government always has everyone's best interest at heart! More surveillance is good, as long as the government does it, right?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Village of the faceless screaming hicks? Maybe not the same ring as night of the living dead but still.
The thing about British hicks, you know... the type that wears tweed clothes, wellies, flat caps and drives around in moss-green landrovers is their infuriatingly stoic nature. In the USA all you need to do to convince a bunch of hillbillies to break out ye-olde lynching rope is to take the lord's name in vain (or mention Darwin). In Britain, however, even when the hicks carry double barrelled shotguns the worst that can happen to you is being invited to tea and cucumber sandwiches and bored to death by stories about the intricacies pheasant hunting. The un-armed variety usually defaults to talking about bovine disease or complaining about the price of manure. Getting them angry is almost impossible, although if you try hard enough you may succeed in getting an emotional outburst. A stiffening upper lip followed by a slightly high voiced "I say!!!" is a good indicator you are getting somewhere. I'm not sure what Google did to enrage them this time. Just driving around taking photos is not a convincing reason. Perhaps some mean-spirited person tacked a sign to the back of the Google van reading something like "God shave the queen" ???
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.
It's not the paper cuts, it's the sparks from the flint in their toilet paper causing ignition. I actually visited London a few decades ago: unless it's changed, that paper is a violation of the Geneva convention.
Speaking as someone who in a previous life committed a 'burg' or two, I can safely say that Google streetview is a fucking useless tool for burglary for a very simple reason, it shows only the visible parts of the property - the parts that are visible to anyone who walks past.
The last thing a burglar wants to do is to hang around on the most visible part of the property where anyone driving past can see them. Google street view provides a really slow, probably out of date and restricted way of doing the easiest part of a burglary, driving down the street and looking for a house to go into.
Seriously, it takes about two minutes to case a whole street in a car, but it takes about 15 minutes to do the same with Google. If someone is stupid enough to leave expensive items like jewelry or their PS3 on display in a window, then they're likely to get burgled by local feevs long before their photo pops up on Google.
Having said that, I could believe that 'steal-to-order' car thieves might find street view handy (car thieves already use tools like registration plate lookups to find a target), but home burglaries aren't lucrative enough to warrant a lot of preparation, especially when it doesn't seem like it would make home burglary any safer or significantly more profitable.
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.
JK Rowling stole from me. She wrote her first book while claiming state benefits. Then when she got rich and famous, she ran off to the USA, so none of her taxes are going back in to top up that pot that she leeched from.