Photo: Demian Hobby
We ‘hoover’ the house when it’s dusty, ‘clingfilm’ our leftovers to sate a late-night hunger, daydream of ‘jetskiing’ Baywatch-esque through turquoise waters, ‘Google’ the answer to a drunken argument over who created cream cheese… When brand names become so ubiquitous they morph into adjectives, it can categorically said they have become part of our collective consciousness.
Usually considered a benevolent Big Brother, Google’s introduction of Google Street View to the UK last week has been greeted with flurries of a media storm. The feature, part of Google Maps, provides 360 degree panoramic views of the streets of 25 UK cities.
A myriad of concerns have been voiced, ranging from claims of invasions of privacy to apprehension the service could be used as an aid in planning crimes.
Google’s use of face recognition technology to blur out faces and registration plates that appear in the images was enough to satisfy the Information Commissioner, who ruled last year that the blurring was sufficient to maintain privacy.
But Simon Davies of Privacy International points to existing case law suggesting images taken for commercial purposes must have prior consent of individuals depicted. The ICO did not ruled on that issue, leaving the privacy protection available murky.
Davies stated: “These images are being captured without people’s permission for commercial use and we believe that it is not legally acceptable. They are also putting into place a system for updating these images in the future, and for storing the images digitally where they could be misused.”
“We’re not trying to destroy the concept of Street View. What we’re saying is that it should be deployed in an environment of historic rights, and people shouldn’t be seduced into believing that just because a technology appears to be cool it must be allowed to proceed.”
The Daily Mail has also spoken out about the application, branding it a “burglar’s charter”. This editorial stance has not been echoed in the actions of its owner, DMGT, who also owns estate agents website Find a Property, one of Street View’s key partners.
In the wake of the shootings of a police officer and two soldiers in Northern Ireland, Stormont Assembly member and Ian Paisley Jr. labeled Google “reckless” and “incredibly stupid” for including images of the perimeters of police stations and army barracks in greater Belfast. According to BBC Northern Ireland, the number plate of a car entering a police station was unblurred in one photo.
Paisley, also a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, said: “This endangers the public. Even though the images can be removed they are now out there. It will be a case of bolting the stable door.”
Google Street View users can report concerns about photos using an online form. Spokespeople for Google have stated they can cut homes and people out of the images.
Dozens of images were removed during the first few days of the service’s launch in the UK, replaced by a black image stating “This image is no longer available”.
Some of the removed photos included a man outside a pub staring at a puddle of his own vomit while being comforted by a friend sporting antlers, a man leaving a sex shop in Soho, and numerous arrests. Many of them can still be viewed by moving slightly up the street.
Privacy expert Dr Ian Brown at the Oxford Internet Institute, stated: “This is exactly what you would expect from a service that relies on individuals to help Google not make mistakes.
“[Google] should have thought more carefully about how they designed the service to avoid exactly this sort of thing.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Google’s face recognition technology blurred out faces on movies posters, a mural depicting IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, statues, and, in one house in Leeds, the head of a floor mop.
Emma Hill, fourth year Journalism student, said: “I think it’s atrocious. It’s another infringement on our privacy and another step into the Orwellian world which we are already pretty much living in.”
But while public debate continues, (one comment on the BBC read: “In what way is it an invasion of privacy? They’re taking pictures of houses, not you.”), there has been little discussion of the wider issue of Google’s relationship with our collective consciousness.
Google’s near chokehold monopoly on how we investigate the internet is further tightened with this marriage of web searching and multimedia maps. Google’s competitors have again been trumped. Microsoft introduced 3D maps of cities at about the same time as Google launched Street View in the US in May 2007. However, to use its ‘Virtual Earth’ service, users were compelled to download custom software. Street View simply uses Adobe Flash technology, already installed in some form in 99.9% of browsers, exploiting one monopoly to cement another. Yahoo Maps were dealt a paralyzing blow by Yahoo’s chief executive Carol Bartes, who snapped at a technology conference audience member who mentioned Google Map’s dominance: “I don’t use Yahoo maps. I use Google maps. I’m just telling you.”
Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything, summed up his concerns over Google’s virtual tentacles.
“We found over time that there is no real harm that anyone has been able to discern from [Street View]. If anything, it falls short of useful. It is a clever gimmick. It’s yet another service that keeps us gazing at Google.
“The problem is not so much the actions of the company. It’s our easy and accepting relationship with Google. We enter our relationship with Google not really grasping it.
“We are not Google’s customers. Google calls us users but in fact we are Google’s product. Our attention Google sells to its customers, who are advertisers. That’s not a radical or new notion. But the idea here is that it is so precisely targeted, so precisely discerned, that there are real consequences in how it treats us and how it uses us.”
Published in Veritas Issue 104 Wednesday 24th April, 2005.
