Sorry to reply to my own post, but I feel obliged to point out for anyone who doesn't know that Beautiful Code is a compendium of chapters written by many different contributing authors. I mentioned Peyton-Jones by name, but he was only responsible for that one (very good) chapter; the disappointing material I mentioned came from some of the other contributors. Sorry for not making this clear in the parent post.
I don't understand this prejudice that people have shown in this discussion and the other recent one on a related subject. Sure, there are a lot of people using POD or certain small publishers who are basically vanity authors. But there are also some people who write well and provide useful, interesting or funny material.
The thing is, the story is exactly the same with the large publishing houses. While the signal-noise ratio may be somewhat better, I'm not convinced it's by much: most of the widely advertised technical books I've bought from major publishers recently have been disappointing, too.
For example, I've followed the work of Simon Peyton-Jones for a while now. He wrote a chapter in Beautiful Code about Software Transactional Memory, which was also freely available on-line. It was up to his usual excellent standards: interesting, informative and highly readable. I wondered what else I might learn and bought the whole book... and found that much of the rest is obvious, boring, and generally not worth the cost of the paper it's printed on. And this was the much-hyped, much-awarded, critically-acclaimed book of the year, full of insights that let you see into the minds of some of the brightest stars in our industry today? Bollocks was it.
As a more subtle example, I preferred Code Complete's first edition to the second. I found the advice in the latter often contrary to my own experiences of what works well — a criticism I rarely, if ever, levelled at the first edition. The revised version reads like McConnell (or his publisher?) felt he should cover now-mainstream topics like exceptions and OO. Alas, rather than filling it with solid, practical advice and evidence from the trenches as in the first version, the revised version is just full of examples using trendy OO languages. But worse, the new parts contain a lot of commentary that sounds more like the standard OO marketing spiel than the battle-hardened wisdom of the earlier book. I half-expect to see a third edition in a few years, suddenly discovering the joys of functional programming languages and proclaiming the advantages of computing without state, just as the industry leaders are approaching Peyton-Jones's "both useful and safe" utopia and concluding that sometimes state really is the easiest way to express things as long as it's managed in a controlled way.
It's unfortunate that these are the first two examples that came to my mind, because they are far from the worst books on the market today. Indeed, there is enough really good material in either that I would still recommend them (with caveats) to a lot of people. But they are also good examples of the fact that just having a big name publisher is no guarantee you'll get a great book. If you can take work from authors of the calibre of Peyton-Jones and McConnell, yet produce books like Beautiful Code and Code Complete, 2nd Edition, you are doing something wrong.
Also, what about authors who already have POD contracts with other publishers. They are condemned never to appear on amazon searches, which a lot of people use to find books on esoteric subjects thinking they cover most available material.
Amazon are pretty dominant in the on-line book sales market at the moment, but moves like this won't keep them that way. It seems to me that they are creating a big opportunity for one of their rivals to get ahead with the small/independent publishers. If I were an executive at, say, Barnes & Noble or Bookpool, I would be rubbing my hands together with glee, contacting the kinds of industry body mentioned in these blog posts, and talking about new ways to promote these markets more aggressively.
The only thing I can think of is understanding pointers and how memory is laid out. But that really falls outside the scope of algorithms and data structures which is what intro level CS is really all about.
Understanding the concept of indirection — by which I mean here one piece of data that refers to another — is absolutely fundamental to understanding non-trivial data structures. It doesn't have to be done with pointers: the recursive data types in functional programming languages would be another way to look at some common cases, for example. But you have to understand the idea, and you do not learn that using cookie-cutter container class libraries and a language that actively obfuscates pointers.
This is not to say that C++ is a good language for teaching computing of any kind. C++ is a pragmatic tool, a Jack-of-all-trades, useful for many practical things but very confusing to a beginner and full of tricky details. I'd much rather they used, say, C and Python for a course at that level. But Java was never a sensible teaching language: it has pretty much all of the bad points of C++ in this respect, yet none of the redeeming features. Moving to Java as a primary teaching language is one of the dumbest moves in the history of teaching CS, and I've never understood why so many otherwise reputable institutions lost the plot on that one.
They are doing "pictures" of almost every web site out there right now. Did they ask all the web site owners? No? Then maybe they shouldn't do that!
That's right, maybe they shouldn't.
Did you realise that Google Cache is probably operating in violation of copyright, even in the US, which has the most liberal fair use laws of any jurisdiction I know?
There's a similar argument that can be made for Google Groups, too.
I'm sorry, but why does a building such as the Empire State Building qualify for "copyright on its image"? Who owns this copyright? And why does the equivalent person for every other property not get a copyright on their property's image?
But privacy really attaches to humans and if they are in view of others even that right vanishes.
Privacy is much broader than just whether you can be seen in the street. It covers a whole range of things, which in the modern era should include things like not having someone building up a database about you and particularly not doing so and then making it publicly available. If society doesn't recognise this and legislate accordingly sooner rather than later, then the rate of life-destroying crimes like identity theft will continue to increase faster than just about any other crime, and we will descend into a world where, since no-one is perfect, everyone's good reputation and prospects can be arbitrarily shattered. If you want to live in that world, good luck to you, but personally, I'd rather acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes and privacy is important, and live in a world that makes reasonable allowances for that.
there is no such thing as common courtesy or acceptable polite behavior.
Nor good manners, it seems. Do you really think you make your points any more convincing by swearing, posting ad hominem attacks, and burning straw men? How unfortunate. It's ironic that your other examples (going through the trash or tracking my car) would both be illegal where I am precisely because people did consider them inappropriate behaviour and the law was changed to reflect that.
The thing is, much of the time when governments do those things, I don't support that either. Taxation is basically just legalised theft, and I strongly disagree with my current government's policy on taxing and spending. Most of the recent times my country has gone to war, I haven't agreed with the principle or the need to do so to protect ourselves. Right now, the government is basically trying to kid us that we're in a perpetual state of emergency because of the claimed terrorist threat (which kills fewer people per year than hundreds of other treatable/preventable circumstances we could have spent all that time, money, popular support and human effort improving) and has enacted laws that allow one indirectly appointed official to pretty much arbitrarily strip away numerous basic rights and freedoms from the people in the eyes of the law. None of this stuff sounds good to me.
In other words, it's not that I think your average citizen should be able to do them all, it's that I think if you can't trust your citizens with such responsibilities, you probably can't trust a government or a corporation with them either.
No, I would be supportive of criminalising people who put up privacy-invading photos of other people on flickr or facebook. The chances of any typical casual photo of family and friends falling into that category are pretty slim. Moreover, it's not like you put up a photo on those sites without seeing it first and actively choosing to do so, so there's not much excuse for putting up something that does have unpleasant implications for someone else.
Don't be absurd. No-one is talking about restricting someone just walking down the street. I've already written an extensive reply in another post to the question of whether objecting to Street View also means objecting to incidental photography for personal use.
I may be many things, but I doubt anyone who knows me would describe me as a socialist.;-)
I'm not claiming that all services must be government run. On the contrary, I tend to prefer a combination of small government and market forces, with small government setting up just enough regulation to keep the markets operating competitively. I just don't think describing something run by a profit-making corporation as a "public service" is an accurate representation, particularly when it's not providing for a basic need like water or electricity.
How likely are you to get your details stolen if you're careful to keep your system up to date with anti-virus, use a personal firewall, and don't use IE?
It's funny you should mention that. Just this weekend, after filling up my car, the machine in the service station wouldn't accept the PIN for my credit card. (There is zero chance that I forgot this number, nor that I mistyped it repeatedly.) I rang the card company shortly afterwards, and was told that their computer had no record of any attempted transaction that day. So now I've been to a place I don't usually go, and they've had sight of my card and I've typed my PIN into a machine that looked like the usual terminals, yet the card company's system didn't know about it. It's probably just a computer/communications glitch and nothing dishonest, but I still had the card cancelled and the PIN randomised just to be safe: even if my geeky alarm bells hadn't already been ringing, just a few weeks ago, researchers at my local university demonstrated pretty clearly how easy it would be to get into credit card fraud from this starting point. I bet a lot of people would say I was being paranoid and wouldn't have bothered, though.
In this case Google did apparently go well onto private property, so I think any claim that they're just doing what anyone could do from on the street is a bit dubious here.
On the subject of casual photography of buildings, please see another of my posts for why I think that is a different situation in several significant ways.
I could insult that reply in similarly vague terms, but just for kicks, I shall annihilate it point by point.
First this is a non-story legally and financially until we hear otherwise.
That doesn't mean it isn't of interest to the many people already discussing it on this forum.
If they believed they were doing something that wrong, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Yes, because corporations have never been known to do things that are unethical or even outright illegal just to make a quick buck. That's why there are so many happy Enron shareholders in the world today.
Their strategy of putting everything up and then removing things only when requested is the only privacy approach that is technically feasible.
No, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure there's another possibility that's technically very easy to achieve: they could just not systematically collect photos of people's homes without consent in the first place.
No-one is forcing them to run this system. The fact that it's difficult to do so in a way that complies with what I claim most people would agree is common decency (they were even going onto private property in this case!) is their problem, and it's one they need to overcome if they want to run the system.
Your stance is BS legally.
No, my stance is that if the law allows this behaviour, then the law is BS. That is not the same thing.
You also make it sound like this is some devious plan to sell people's privacy for money.
Now that is hilarious. Google's entire business model is based on being the biggest data gatherer in the world, and extracting relevant personal information from that data in order to target advertising that generates them profit.
I have worked at Google for about a year, and you have no idea how they work.
Ah, I see. You were one of them. Now we know why you were so defensive.
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Google is a big company, your average Slashdot reader is some level of geek, and as a consequence it's a good bet that many of us know one or more people who work or worked at Google. Whatever you saw in your few moths in one part of the company is not the only view anyone here has into the company as a whole and how it operates. In fact, it is entirely possible that there are people following this discussion who know way more about Google than you do.
They have more money than they know what to do with. Streetview, like many projects, was started with no financial incentive in mind at all - just a product that they thought would be interesting and useful. If they find out how to monetize later, great. If not, it's just one more cool thing Google does. That is the idea behind virtually every project Google does outside of Search & Ads.
Perhaps you don't realise this for some reason, but Google is there to make money for their shareholders. Since they became a listed company, that is their primary responsibility. It doesn't have to be direct and immediate — after all, half of "R&D" is the R bit — but if you think they will run projects like this and not attempt to monetize them at some point, you're kidding yourself. In fact, it might well be illegal for their directors not to do so if they found a legal way of doing it.
I didn't realize that Google (and other)'s ability to make most of the Internet free to users by providing inconspicuous text ads was a horrible privacy invasion.
Apparently you also didn't realise that most of the Internet was free to users without targetted advertising before Google came along. Whether the greater volume of material now available in a Google Ads-supported world is an improvement over
The problem is, Google aren't a public service. They are not part of the government. They have no official status as, for example, charities do. They are simply a profit-making commercial organisation that enjoys no special privilege, trying to get away with stuff because they are a large and therefore somewhat influential commercial organisation.
Sure, they seem to have dug their own grave in this specific case because of the private road sign. But more generally, just as they (as you observe) will tend to push the envelope, so the law needs to push firmly back again when they get too far across that grey area. I think some of their recent projects have pretty much been outright black, and Street View is probably one of them.
For one thing, presumably any image of my house is incidental: you were photographing your friends and family at a barbecue, not deliberately going up to my house just to photograph it.
For another, your photo probably doesn't record much detail from inside my house through the windows or doors caught in your shot.
Next, presumably such images are for your own private use, and not for general distribution to the public.
Finally, you're not systematically going about getting pictures of everyone's houses and building a searchable database of the lot. With a lot of privacy issues, the existence of one piece of data is only a small part of the problem, and the greater danger is in the systematic collection and data mining of lots of such data.
These issues are rarely black and white, but comparing taking an incidental picture of someone's own home for private use to Google's behaviour with Street View is like comparing quoting a small excerpt from a book in a review for critical purposes with industrial copying and redistribution of the entire work. One of those we consider reasonable and inoffensive, and the law in most places provides a pretty clear exception for it. The other we consider unreasonable, and it is illegal in most places.
Imagine if Google had to get the OK from everybody before submitting pictures, web search, and book contents. That would absolutely kill their revenue.
Yes, it probably would. But some things are reasonable and generally inoffensive, and some things are pretty clearly illegal and/or unethical. "It would spoil my business model" is never an excuse for doing the latter. If enforcing your right to privacy and mine happens to destroy a market for people who collect and resell personal data about us so other people can spam us with advertising we don't care about, that's just too bad.
And there is no equivalent to remove your house from their satellite stuff if you so desire.
Not unless you are, say, the US Government, that is. Apparently their right to privacy extends to not having photographs of their facilities publicly available.
There should be a constitutional rule that says no government or corporate body may ever have a right not universally available to an individual citizen. If something is important enough for the guys with power and money to protect, it's important enough to protect it for everyone else, too.
I'm sorry, but you are spectacularly missing my point.
I do have an expectation of privacy in my own home. This expectation is born of common courtesy and acceptable polite behaviour. Moreover, I claim that I am far from the only person with such a view: if you walked along a street obviously going up to people's windows and taking detailed photographs of the inside of their home, do you not think a substantial number of them would also have a problem with this behaviour? The fact that Google is doing this far more disceetly does not change the nature of what they are doing, nor the feelings many people would have about it if they knew it was going on.
You are in essence making a legal argument: the law does not currently prohibit such abusive behaviour. I am making an ethical one: if that is so, then the law is broken.
Perhaps because he was right, and the alternative was continuing to live in denial of the idea that anything Google does could possibly be wrong? Just read Google's view of the subject:
Google, on the other hand, claims that this lawsuit is pointless since anyone can ask them to have pictures removed without legal action.
Sure, but I bet they wouldn't have volunteered any compensation or accepted any penalty in recognition of the fact that they did do something wrong.
Google have become far too big for their boots in recent years. They need to be taught the meaning of respecting people's privacy, and now they're a shareholder-driven company, the most effective way to do that is to penalise them financially. If everyone who finds Google's Street View is unreasonably invading their privacy gets awarded a substantial sum of money then Google will learn that this behaviour is not acceptable and stop doing it. (Failing that, we should start locking up their directors, but obviously it's not likely to come to that.)
Personally, I believe any photograph taken without permission that looks into someone's home is an invasion of privacy. This is not at all the same situation as a neighbour casually passing by in the street, where no-one is both recording what they see and republishing it for the rest of the world in searchable form. Right now, a lot of our laws on things like privacy and data protection are well behind the curve in terms of technology. I can only hope that publicising a few more cases like Simon Bunce, where someone's entire life is wrecked because one leak of personal data snowballed into identity theft and all that implies, will wake up governments to the fact that big business's need to spam us all with advertising and keep our credit card numbers on file for... well, because they couldn't be bothered not to... is not more important then your right and mine to live a private life free from unwarranted scrutiny by all and sundry.
Personally, I hope the complainant gets the $25k in this case, not because I necessarily believe they suffered as much as their claims suggest, but because I think it would be healthy to have such a damaging precedent on file as a deterrent to Google and anyone else who thinks that just because they can collect and process vast amounts of data that means they have no ethical or legal obligations on how they do so.
British Telecom was for a very long time monopoly holder on telephone lines in the UK and still the gatekeeper for all ADSL access there. They have a market cap of 35 billion and their revenue just about puts them in the top ten telecoms companies in the world.
Yes, but they're also an ISP, in the normal "we connect your computer to the Internet" meaning of the term. Though goodness knows what convoluted name that part of their organisation goes by since all the Yahoo mess; I switched away from them years ago.
I'm not sure about counter-suing in quite that sense, because you basically reverse the whole process to the point that the authorities won't bring anything to court that they aren't absolutely sure they will win. Courts exist to try cases on merit by listening to both sides arguments and making a decision, and I don't think we should force that role onto the prosecuting authorities and turn courts into a rubber stamp.
On the other hand, abolishing Crown immunity so that someone who has been seriously wronged by the system can seek extensive compensation via the courts would be a step in the right direction: authorities that persistently screw things up in a big way would pay for it in a similarly big way, and at least there would be some sense of justice for those who were wronged. Perhaps we could combine this with electing the senior police and public prosecution officials, as is done in some other countries IIRC, such that those who blew their budgets so everyone's taxes went up would rapidly find themselves out of a job, while those who successfully brought big cases without screwing up badly would probably be re-elected if they wished.
Similarly, the idea that as a witness I will at least receive some basic compensation for the court for loss of earnings if I give up my time to attend, yet as a defendant I would receive nothing even if found not guilty, is just broken. This can happen routinely on a small scale, not just in spectacularly poor cases like this one, too: at present in this country, we have people being wrongly charged with a minor parking offence, and tried in a court on the other side of the country where the alleged offence took place (often as a result of false number plates). It would actually cost more in cash, never mind time, for these people to travel to the court to defend themselves than it costs to take the hit and pay up the fine, so people accept that they are guilty because it's financially in their interests to do so. Such a system is inherently corrupt and cannot possibly act in the interests of justice.
I understand your position but unfortunately the only other alternative is to make the court secret which can seriously jeopardize the result at the end.
Sorry, you've lost me. As long as the proceedings are fully and accurately documented and those documents are then published at the conclusion of the trial, by which time the accused will either be a convict or no longer a suspect in the eyes of the law, there is no more scope for abuse in practice than there is today. At present, the only thing that can happen outside the court during a trial to change the course of that trial is for people involved to be influenced by external sources such as the media, which is hardly in the interests of justice and fairness anyway even without the sort of absurdity we're talking about in TFA. How would conducting the trial in secret (if the defence so requests) prejudice things otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I feel obliged to point out for anyone who doesn't know that Beautiful Code is a compendium of chapters written by many different contributing authors. I mentioned Peyton-Jones by name, but he was only responsible for that one (very good) chapter; the disappointing material I mentioned came from some of the other contributors. Sorry for not making this clear in the parent post.
I don't understand this prejudice that people have shown in this discussion and the other recent one on a related subject. Sure, there are a lot of people using POD or certain small publishers who are basically vanity authors. But there are also some people who write well and provide useful, interesting or funny material.
The thing is, the story is exactly the same with the large publishing houses. While the signal-noise ratio may be somewhat better, I'm not convinced it's by much: most of the widely advertised technical books I've bought from major publishers recently have been disappointing, too.
For example, I've followed the work of Simon Peyton-Jones for a while now. He wrote a chapter in Beautiful Code about Software Transactional Memory, which was also freely available on-line. It was up to his usual excellent standards: interesting, informative and highly readable. I wondered what else I might learn and bought the whole book... and found that much of the rest is obvious, boring, and generally not worth the cost of the paper it's printed on. And this was the much-hyped, much-awarded, critically-acclaimed book of the year, full of insights that let you see into the minds of some of the brightest stars in our industry today? Bollocks was it.
As a more subtle example, I preferred Code Complete's first edition to the second. I found the advice in the latter often contrary to my own experiences of what works well — a criticism I rarely, if ever, levelled at the first edition. The revised version reads like McConnell (or his publisher?) felt he should cover now-mainstream topics like exceptions and OO. Alas, rather than filling it with solid, practical advice and evidence from the trenches as in the first version, the revised version is just full of examples using trendy OO languages. But worse, the new parts contain a lot of commentary that sounds more like the standard OO marketing spiel than the battle-hardened wisdom of the earlier book. I half-expect to see a third edition in a few years, suddenly discovering the joys of functional programming languages and proclaiming the advantages of computing without state, just as the industry leaders are approaching Peyton-Jones's "both useful and safe" utopia and concluding that sometimes state really is the easiest way to express things as long as it's managed in a controlled way.
It's unfortunate that these are the first two examples that came to my mind, because they are far from the worst books on the market today. Indeed, there is enough really good material in either that I would still recommend them (with caveats) to a lot of people. But they are also good examples of the fact that just having a big name publisher is no guarantee you'll get a great book. If you can take work from authors of the calibre of Peyton-Jones and McConnell, yet produce books like Beautiful Code and Code Complete, 2nd Edition, you are doing something wrong.
Also, what about authors who already have POD contracts with other publishers. They are condemned never to appear on amazon searches, which a lot of people use to find books on esoteric subjects thinking they cover most available material.
Amazon are pretty dominant in the on-line book sales market at the moment, but moves like this won't keep them that way. It seems to me that they are creating a big opportunity for one of their rivals to get ahead with the small/independent publishers. If I were an executive at, say, Barnes & Noble or Bookpool, I would be rubbing my hands together with glee, contacting the kinds of industry body mentioned in these blog posts, and talking about new ways to promote these markets more aggressively.
Well, if you can't have the real Summer Glau... ;-)
The only thing I can think of is understanding pointers and how memory is laid out. But that really falls outside the scope of algorithms and data structures which is what intro level CS is really all about.
Understanding the concept of indirection — by which I mean here one piece of data that refers to another — is absolutely fundamental to understanding non-trivial data structures. It doesn't have to be done with pointers: the recursive data types in functional programming languages would be another way to look at some common cases, for example. But you have to understand the idea, and you do not learn that using cookie-cutter container class libraries and a language that actively obfuscates pointers.
This is not to say that C++ is a good language for teaching computing of any kind. C++ is a pragmatic tool, a Jack-of-all-trades, useful for many practical things but very confusing to a beginner and full of tricky details. I'd much rather they used, say, C and Python for a course at that level. But Java was never a sensible teaching language: it has pretty much all of the bad points of C++ in this respect, yet none of the redeeming features. Moving to Java as a primary teaching language is one of the dumbest moves in the history of teaching CS, and I've never understood why so many otherwise reputable institutions lost the plot on that one.
They are doing "pictures" of almost every web site out there right now. Did they ask all the web site owners? No? Then maybe they shouldn't do that!
That's right, maybe they shouldn't.
Did you realise that Google Cache is probably operating in violation of copyright, even in the US, which has the most liberal fair use laws of any jurisdiction I know?
There's a similar argument that can be made for Google Groups, too.
I'm sorry, but why does a building such as the Empire State Building qualify for "copyright on its image"? Who owns this copyright? And why does the equivalent person for every other property not get a copyright on their property's image?
But privacy really attaches to humans and if they are in view of others even that right vanishes.
Privacy is much broader than just whether you can be seen in the street. It covers a whole range of things, which in the modern era should include things like not having someone building up a database about you and particularly not doing so and then making it publicly available. If society doesn't recognise this and legislate accordingly sooner rather than later, then the rate of life-destroying crimes like identity theft will continue to increase faster than just about any other crime, and we will descend into a world where, since no-one is perfect, everyone's good reputation and prospects can be arbitrarily shattered. If you want to live in that world, good luck to you, but personally, I'd rather acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes and privacy is important, and live in a world that makes reasonable allowances for that.
there is no such thing as common courtesy or acceptable polite behavior.
Nor good manners, it seems. Do you really think you make your points any more convincing by swearing, posting ad hominem attacks, and burning straw men? How unfortunate. It's ironic that your other examples (going through the trash or tracking my car) would both be illegal where I am precisely because people did consider them inappropriate behaviour and the law was changed to reflect that.
The thing is, much of the time when governments do those things, I don't support that either. Taxation is basically just legalised theft, and I strongly disagree with my current government's policy on taxing and spending. Most of the recent times my country has gone to war, I haven't agreed with the principle or the need to do so to protect ourselves. Right now, the government is basically trying to kid us that we're in a perpetual state of emergency because of the claimed terrorist threat (which kills fewer people per year than hundreds of other treatable/preventable circumstances we could have spent all that time, money, popular support and human effort improving) and has enacted laws that allow one indirectly appointed official to pretty much arbitrarily strip away numerous basic rights and freedoms from the people in the eyes of the law. None of this stuff sounds good to me.
In other words, it's not that I think your average citizen should be able to do them all, it's that I think if you can't trust your citizens with such responsibilities, you probably can't trust a government or a corporation with them either.
No, I would be supportive of criminalising people who put up privacy-invading photos of other people on flickr or facebook. The chances of any typical casual photo of family and friends falling into that category are pretty slim. Moreover, it's not like you put up a photo on those sites without seeing it first and actively choosing to do so, so there's not much excuse for putting up something that does have unpleasant implications for someone else.
Don't be absurd. No-one is talking about restricting someone just walking down the street. I've already written an extensive reply in another post to the question of whether objecting to Street View also means objecting to incidental photography for personal use.
I may be many things, but I doubt anyone who knows me would describe me as a socialist. ;-)
I'm not claiming that all services must be government run. On the contrary, I tend to prefer a combination of small government and market forces, with small government setting up just enough regulation to keep the markets operating competitively. I just don't think describing something run by a profit-making corporation as a "public service" is an accurate representation, particularly when it's not providing for a basic need like water or electricity.
How likely are you to get your details stolen if you're careful to keep your system up to date with anti-virus, use a personal firewall, and don't use IE?
It's funny you should mention that. Just this weekend, after filling up my car, the machine in the service station wouldn't accept the PIN for my credit card. (There is zero chance that I forgot this number, nor that I mistyped it repeatedly.) I rang the card company shortly afterwards, and was told that their computer had no record of any attempted transaction that day. So now I've been to a place I don't usually go, and they've had sight of my card and I've typed my PIN into a machine that looked like the usual terminals, yet the card company's system didn't know about it. It's probably just a computer/communications glitch and nothing dishonest, but I still had the card cancelled and the PIN randomised just to be safe: even if my geeky alarm bells hadn't already been ringing, just a few weeks ago, researchers at my local university demonstrated pretty clearly how easy it would be to get into credit card fraud from this starting point. I bet a lot of people would say I was being paranoid and wouldn't have bothered, though.
In this case Google did apparently go well onto private property, so I think any claim that they're just doing what anyone could do from on the street is a bit dubious here.
On the subject of casual photography of buildings, please see another of my posts for why I think that is a different situation in several significant ways.
I could insult that reply in similarly vague terms, but just for kicks, I shall annihilate it point by point.
First this is a non-story legally and financially until we hear otherwise.
That doesn't mean it isn't of interest to the many people already discussing it on this forum.
If they believed they were doing something that wrong, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Yes, because corporations have never been known to do things that are unethical or even outright illegal just to make a quick buck. That's why there are so many happy Enron shareholders in the world today.
Their strategy of putting everything up and then removing things only when requested is the only privacy approach that is technically feasible.
No, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure there's another possibility that's technically very easy to achieve: they could just not systematically collect photos of people's homes without consent in the first place.
No-one is forcing them to run this system. The fact that it's difficult to do so in a way that complies with what I claim most people would agree is common decency (they were even going onto private property in this case!) is their problem, and it's one they need to overcome if they want to run the system.
Your stance is BS legally.
No, my stance is that if the law allows this behaviour, then the law is BS. That is not the same thing.
You also make it sound like this is some devious plan to sell people's privacy for money.
Now that is hilarious. Google's entire business model is based on being the biggest data gatherer in the world, and extracting relevant personal information from that data in order to target advertising that generates them profit.
I have worked at Google for about a year, and you have no idea how they work.
Ah, I see. You were one of them. Now we know why you were so defensive.
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Google is a big company, your average Slashdot reader is some level of geek, and as a consequence it's a good bet that many of us know one or more people who work or worked at Google. Whatever you saw in your few moths in one part of the company is not the only view anyone here has into the company as a whole and how it operates. In fact, it is entirely possible that there are people following this discussion who know way more about Google than you do.
They have more money than they know what to do with. Streetview, like many projects, was started with no financial incentive in mind at all - just a product that they thought would be interesting and useful. If they find out how to monetize later, great. If not, it's just one more cool thing Google does. That is the idea behind virtually every project Google does outside of Search & Ads.
Perhaps you don't realise this for some reason, but Google is there to make money for their shareholders. Since they became a listed company, that is their primary responsibility. It doesn't have to be direct and immediate — after all, half of "R&D" is the R bit — but if you think they will run projects like this and not attempt to monetize them at some point, you're kidding yourself. In fact, it might well be illegal for their directors not to do so if they found a legal way of doing it.
I didn't realize that Google (and other)'s ability to make most of the Internet free to users by providing inconspicuous text ads was a horrible privacy invasion.
Apparently you also didn't realise that most of the Internet was free to users without targetted advertising before Google came along. Whether the greater volume of material now available in a Google Ads-supported world is an improvement over
The problem is, Google aren't a public service. They are not part of the government. They have no official status as, for example, charities do. They are simply a profit-making commercial organisation that enjoys no special privilege, trying to get away with stuff because they are a large and therefore somewhat influential commercial organisation.
Sure, they seem to have dug their own grave in this specific case because of the private road sign. But more generally, just as they (as you observe) will tend to push the envelope, so the law needs to push firmly back again when they get too far across that grey area. I think some of their recent projects have pretty much been outright black, and Street View is probably one of them.
I think that's a totally different situation.
For one thing, presumably any image of my house is incidental: you were photographing your friends and family at a barbecue, not deliberately going up to my house just to photograph it.
For another, your photo probably doesn't record much detail from inside my house through the windows or doors caught in your shot.
Next, presumably such images are for your own private use, and not for general distribution to the public.
Finally, you're not systematically going about getting pictures of everyone's houses and building a searchable database of the lot. With a lot of privacy issues, the existence of one piece of data is only a small part of the problem, and the greater danger is in the systematic collection and data mining of lots of such data.
These issues are rarely black and white, but comparing taking an incidental picture of someone's own home for private use to Google's behaviour with Street View is like comparing quoting a small excerpt from a book in a review for critical purposes with industrial copying and redistribution of the entire work. One of those we consider reasonable and inoffensive, and the law in most places provides a pretty clear exception for it. The other we consider unreasonable, and it is illegal in most places.
Imagine if Google had to get the OK from everybody before submitting pictures, web search, and book contents. That would absolutely kill their revenue.
Yes, it probably would. But some things are reasonable and generally inoffensive, and some things are pretty clearly illegal and/or unethical. "It would spoil my business model" is never an excuse for doing the latter. If enforcing your right to privacy and mine happens to destroy a market for people who collect and resell personal data about us so other people can spam us with advertising we don't care about, that's just too bad.
And there is no equivalent to remove your house from their satellite stuff if you so desire.
Not unless you are, say, the US Government, that is. Apparently their right to privacy extends to not having photographs of their facilities publicly available.
There should be a constitutional rule that says no government or corporate body may ever have a right not universally available to an individual citizen. If something is important enough for the guys with power and money to protect, it's important enough to protect it for everyone else, too.
I'm sorry, but you are spectacularly missing my point.
I do have an expectation of privacy in my own home. This expectation is born of common courtesy and acceptable polite behaviour. Moreover, I claim that I am far from the only person with such a view: if you walked along a street obviously going up to people's windows and taking detailed photographs of the inside of their home, do you not think a substantial number of them would also have a problem with this behaviour? The fact that Google is doing this far more disceetly does not change the nature of what they are doing, nor the feelings many people would have about it if they knew it was going on.
You are in essence making a legal argument: the law does not currently prohibit such abusive behaviour. I am making an ethical one: if that is so, then the law is broken.
Why should they have listened to you?
Perhaps because he was right, and the alternative was continuing to live in denial of the idea that anything Google does could possibly be wrong? Just read Google's view of the subject:
Google, on the other hand, claims that this lawsuit is pointless since anyone can ask them to have pictures removed without legal action.
Sure, but I bet they wouldn't have volunteered any compensation or accepted any penalty in recognition of the fact that they did do something wrong.
Google have become far too big for their boots in recent years. They need to be taught the meaning of respecting people's privacy, and now they're a shareholder-driven company, the most effective way to do that is to penalise them financially. If everyone who finds Google's Street View is unreasonably invading their privacy gets awarded a substantial sum of money then Google will learn that this behaviour is not acceptable and stop doing it. (Failing that, we should start locking up their directors, but obviously it's not likely to come to that.)
Personally, I believe any photograph taken without permission that looks into someone's home is an invasion of privacy. This is not at all the same situation as a neighbour casually passing by in the street, where no-one is both recording what they see and republishing it for the rest of the world in searchable form. Right now, a lot of our laws on things like privacy and data protection are well behind the curve in terms of technology. I can only hope that publicising a few more cases like Simon Bunce, where someone's entire life is wrecked because one leak of personal data snowballed into identity theft and all that implies, will wake up governments to the fact that big business's need to spam us all with advertising and keep our credit card numbers on file for... well, because they couldn't be bothered not to... is not more important then your right and mine to live a private life free from unwarranted scrutiny by all and sundry.
Personally, I hope the complainant gets the $25k in this case, not because I necessarily believe they suffered as much as their claims suggest, but because I think it would be healthy to have such a damaging precedent on file as a deterrent to Google and anyone else who thinks that just because they can collect and process vast amounts of data that means they have no ethical or legal obligations on how they do so.
British Telecom was for a very long time monopoly holder on telephone lines in the UK and still the gatekeeper for all ADSL access there. They have a market cap of 35 billion and their revenue just about puts them in the top ten telecoms companies in the world.
Yes, but they're also an ISP, in the normal "we connect your computer to the Internet" meaning of the term. Though goodness knows what convoluted name that part of their organisation goes by since all the Yahoo mess; I switched away from them years ago.
I'm not sure about counter-suing in quite that sense, because you basically reverse the whole process to the point that the authorities won't bring anything to court that they aren't absolutely sure they will win. Courts exist to try cases on merit by listening to both sides arguments and making a decision, and I don't think we should force that role onto the prosecuting authorities and turn courts into a rubber stamp.
On the other hand, abolishing Crown immunity so that someone who has been seriously wronged by the system can seek extensive compensation via the courts would be a step in the right direction: authorities that persistently screw things up in a big way would pay for it in a similarly big way, and at least there would be some sense of justice for those who were wronged. Perhaps we could combine this with electing the senior police and public prosecution officials, as is done in some other countries IIRC, such that those who blew their budgets so everyone's taxes went up would rapidly find themselves out of a job, while those who successfully brought big cases without screwing up badly would probably be re-elected if they wished.
Similarly, the idea that as a witness I will at least receive some basic compensation for the court for loss of earnings if I give up my time to attend, yet as a defendant I would receive nothing even if found not guilty, is just broken. This can happen routinely on a small scale, not just in spectacularly poor cases like this one, too: at present in this country, we have people being wrongly charged with a minor parking offence, and tried in a court on the other side of the country where the alleged offence took place (often as a result of false number plates). It would actually cost more in cash, never mind time, for these people to travel to the court to defend themselves than it costs to take the hit and pay up the fine, so people accept that they are guilty because it's financially in their interests to do so. Such a system is inherently corrupt and cannot possibly act in the interests of justice.
I understand your position but unfortunately the only other alternative is to make the court secret which can seriously jeopardize the result at the end.
Sorry, you've lost me. As long as the proceedings are fully and accurately documented and those documents are then published at the conclusion of the trial, by which time the accused will either be a convict or no longer a suspect in the eyes of the law, there is no more scope for abuse in practice than there is today. At present, the only thing that can happen outside the court during a trial to change the course of that trial is for people involved to be influenced by external sources such as the media, which is hardly in the interests of justice and fairness anyway even without the sort of absurdity we're talking about in TFA. How would conducting the trial in secret (if the defence so requests) prejudice things otherwise?