Standing By Your Sex-Hobbyist -Man; Because It's Your Fault Too?

Ogled By Google


Was able to get out of bed for a few minutes to check the news. (The round of conferences, meetings, flying to 4 different cities and taking care of one of my kids (who's asthma has been acting up) took its toll today. Thank goodness I am near family!! I have about 2 more weeks of this to go - a busy start to the summer.) That said I did some reading online today and came across one subject I have found so interesting since starting this blog 4 1/2 years ago: Privacy & the Internet. I believe people are not only entitled to their opinions but their personal privacy. I don't however, believe in harrassment, defamation or other school-locker-room bullying tactics online. Comments?

Is America's Favorite Search Engine Chugging Into Cyber Privacy?

By JESSE LEAVENWORTH

Hop on Google's Street View and ride through the glass and granite canyons of New York City. Stop smack in the middle of Times Square and spin the view 360 degrees. After Gotham, slide the mouse South to Miami's palm-lined boulevards, then West to sprawling Denver. Check out the Strip in Las Vegas and cruise to the Pacific along Bay Avenue in San Francisco.

The tour includes not only ocean views, grand buildings and public squares, but also college girls in bikinis, guys headed into porn houses, homeless people sprawled on a sidewalk, a street fight and pedestrians picking their noses.

Launched in late May, Google's photographic maps capture all the glory and grime of the big city. Privacy advocates, while conceding the likely legality of Street View, say the digital detail captures too much.

"It crosses a politeness line, whether it's legal or not," said Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The free feature on Google's maps section allows users to visit selected streets in five metropolitan areas. A Google spokeswoman said more cities will be added in the near future. Users begin their journeys by positioning a stick figure on a blue-outlined street, then clicking on the figure. Users move down the street by clicking directional arrows. They can rotate the view in a complete circle and also zoom in and out. Tours are coordinated with a traditional street map that appears on the screen at the same time as the photographic view.

Jeschke, whose organization fights for cyber privacy, said she used Street View herself recently to find an out-of-the-way Oakland restaurant. The service is useful, she said, but also irresponsible because it unveils people in all kinds of situations.

"They could have waited to launch until they learned how to obscure faces,"
Jeschke said. "That wouldn't decrease the value of the service ...

"Think of a person visiting a health clinic. It doesn't even have to be
a reproductive service clinic. Maybe you don't want the world to know you have a foot problem."

"The images in Street View are lawful," Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn wrote in an e-mail. "The Street View feature only contains imagery gathered on public property. At Google, we take privacy very seriously. This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."

Visitors also can flag objectionable images, including those that show nudity and sensitive locations such as domestic violence shelters, Quinn wrote. Users also may ask that images of clearly identifiable individuals be removed.

"We routinely review takedown requests and act quickly to remove objectionable imagery," Quinn wrote.

As long as Google sticks with a naked-eye vantage from public property, the company is on solid legal ground, said Charles Kennedy, a Washington lawyer who specializes in privacy law. The technology, however, could be pressed to the point of illegality, Kennedy said. California law, for example, leashes paparazzi by restricting use of "enhancing technology" designed to probe deeper into private lives.

"As long as they don't use telephoto lenses to get images of people inside houses, I don't think this is an invasion," Kennedy said of Street View.

But even without deeper views into street-level apartments, Google's vehicle-mounted cameras were bound to capture images that could be labeled embarrassing and voyeuristic. Some websites have capitalized on that inevitability by posting stills from Street View that show, for example, men leaving an adult bookstore and an exotic dance club. Images posted at streetviewgallery.corank.com include some young California women lying belly down on the grass with their bikini tops off; a man ogling a woman bending over a park bench; two men in the midst of an apparent fistfight; and police officers ticketing motorists.

Two themes dominate online discussion of Street View - that it's not new (other websites have done the same type of thing), but cool nonetheless; and the invasion-of-privacy question.

"Interestingly enough," a writer on a slashdot.com forum wrote, "this sort of
thing makes `regular' people the victim of what celebrities have had to endure
increasingly for a long time. I'm sure there are many readers of tabloids
enjoying the latest mega-zoom-lens pictures of Jennifer Aniston eating her bagel in bed, whilst complaining that the Google van is invading the oh-so sacred privacy when taking pics from the streets."

"While you can't deny other people the right to look at you in public without your permission," wrote another forum participant, "it's only fair that you get to look at them at the same time. If nothing else, it's reasonable to at least have the opportunity to know who is looking."

Tony Long, copy chief for Wired magazine, wrote recently on the magazine's website that he doesn't buy Google's stance that Street View shows what any pedestrian could see.

"For one thing," Long wrote, "the casual pedestrian isn't staring at a computer screen with your image plastered all over it. And being spotted on the street by a single person, someone as anonymous as you are, is a far cry from being
available to the prurient curiosity of millions of online peeping toms."

The big issue, according to Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is that Google continues on an unregulated course of collecting information from the computer-using public.

"There's a big difference between a person taking a photo on the street and the Internet's largest corporation swallowing up all the data that it can capture," Rotenberg said.

Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, said Street View "is one of those services that makes people think a little bit about what `public' means."

As it stands, Weinstein said he finds the service "falls into a pretty innocent place ... If it's properly managed and Google maintains a responsible stewardship of the service, there's no reason it should become a problem."

Weinstein said he can envision, however, an overreaction leading to laws restricting photography, especially after the overreactions that have already occurred - architectural students stopped from taking photos of bridges, for example - because of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Weinstein noted that the Street View images are not in real time, so thieves and other wrongdoers cannot use them to spot victims or rush to a house with an open front door. Asked how often the images are updated, Quinn, the Google spokeswoman, would only say that the imagery will be refreshed.

Anticipating more visits from the Street View cameras, another writer in the Slashdot forum suggested a concerted effort to bring the site down.

"People like me, 42 and overweight, should leave our blinds open at all times,"
the unidentified person wrote. "Eventually, we'll start showing up in [Street
View] buck naked. And that will be the end of Google views."

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