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GavinSnyderFirstPaper 6 - 25 Jan 2010 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | What Are The Privacy Concerns?
Street View typifies the current trend in privacy issues that we’ve been discussing in class: information that is normally innocuous becomes recorded, digitized, and publicized on the Internet. Because of its accessibility, the data can be used in harmful ways. Just as a drunken bar night photos that would have been of no consequence 20 years ago can now be posted to Facebook and then easily seen by employers, Street View images of people or buildings have the potential to be used in bad ways. Face blurring may avoid the privacy issues with people going into sex shops or vomiting, but it doesn’t address the concerns of many homeowners that Street View will be used by robbers to case their houses in preparation for a heist. | |
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> | This seems like an odd position, doesn't it?
Thieves would be better off going to look, because street view is way
too little to go upon. This has more the feeling of an excuse than a
reason for opposition. | | | And, just as we’ve drawn a distinction in class between protecting a big secret and allowing corporations to data mine you, perhaps the bigger threat here is targeted marketing to homeowners based on photos of their digs. Driveway got potholes? The paving company will want to know. Exotic plants, dead grass? Maybe a landscaper would pay for the information. Of course, it was always possible to drive around neighborhoods and get the same information. But it wasn’t digitized and publicized, and therefore easily cross-indexed with other data. | |
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> | For a local service provider, physical presence
seems a much better idea unless you have great economies of scale
("we are surveying every backyard in the county,") in which case
street view is probably less useful than satellite imagery. A more
interesting question is why street view so much concerns people who
haven't mentioned the Google Maps satellite photos of their
properties. | | | In addition to the privacy concerns raised by third parties’ use of Street View, Google also has the opportunity to profile how Street View is browsed. Just as Facebook is able to predict affairs from knowing which users stalk others, Google, if it wanted to, could profile its users. Google already offers users contextualized local search results when viewing a location in Google Maps. Arguably, there’s not much more that Google knows about you from the fact that you viewed an area in street view than from a bird’s eye view, but if it stores detailed history then patterns may emerge which can be commercially exploited.
What Should Be Done? | | | Two things I particularly like about your piece, though, are that (1) it is proactive, identifying a potential problem before it is fully realized, and (2) it encourages knowledge in the public since, as you suggest, we don't as a society always realize what is happening to privacy. On both points, I commend your work.
-- BrianS - 3 Dec 2009
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> | We all seem to be more or less on the same page
about this essay of yours. The case for harms is weak standing
alone, and the "larger picture"—which is about what happens
when a private entity controls large resources of data consumers want
to use about the circumstances of other peoples' lives—can't be
gotten at in 1,000 words. But each piece in the mosaic is worth
individual scrutiny. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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| Revision 6 | r6 - 25 Jan 2010 - 19:47:07 - EbenMoglen |
| Revision 5 | r5 - 03 Dec 2009 - 05:39:27 - BrianS |
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