With the launch of Google Maps Street View come the inevitable backlash stories.
The New York Times has an article today that describes, how “the Google map service can zoom in so closely on buildings that it has caused Ms. Kalin-Casey and others to complain to the company and on blogs.”
This description comes from the caption to a photograph of Ms. Kalin-Casey and her cat Monty.
Note the irony that Ms. Kalin-Casey’s complaint is that Google photographed her cat.
In a blog post on BoingBoing and in the New York Times article, Ms. Kalin-Casey is quoted as saying that the issue is about where the line is between taking photos in public and zooming in on people’s lives.
Welcome to life as a celebrity. Artist Andy Warhol predicted fifteen minutes of fame for everyone and now we have The Google Corollary: In the future, everyone will be watched.
On the scale of privacy invasions, Google Maps Street View ranks pretty low.
It’s certainly less revealing than the credit profiles financial services companies buy and sell and it’s not nearly as troubling as some stalker standing outside your house, staring.
Wait until we have Google Maps Live Street View, featuring real-time video feeds and burglary-enablement map mashups. Then you can complain.
- Canada Says Google Map Could Break Privacy Law | September 12, 2007
- Live Traffic Information With Google Maps | April 10, 2007
- Google Maps Mashup Shows Spam Sources In Real Time | July 30, 2007
- Google Might Take A Transparency Lesson From Itself | June 14, 2007
- Google Maps Murder Mashup | August 14, 2007
I think this other blog kind of sums it up: http://www.gamespite.net/verbalspew/archives/entry_327.php
Notice the comments are pretty much stalking joke after stalking joke and it takes five comments just to get to one about the game-type content of the blog (and it is a gaming blog, as you might have guessed from the domain name).
My personal favorite comment is “the joke’s going to be on any would-be stalkers when they get to San Fran and find that every street of every residential district looks basically like that.”
Hi Luke,
Have you tried looking anyone up you know with this new street view option with Google Maps?
It will be interesting to see what happens once this is rolled out to other areas.
Take a look at this view
Well it seems that these people complaining don’t realize that Google is not the one who makes the maps, “don’t shoot the messenger?” The maps come from other people’s satellites and google only indexes and copies them. Just like they index websites. Can’t say to google hey that website is bad- if you do you’re an idiot because google doesn’t make the sites they just index them.