Google never ceases to amaze. When the ubiquitous search engine company launched Google maps a couple of years ago users played with the map's satellite feature and tweaked the platform to make everything from beer-finding maps to apartment hunters.
This week Google released Street View, which lets users 'drive through' American cities such as San Francisco and New York. This time though, the response from the internet community wasn't as overwhelmingly positive.
One Oakland, Ca. woman claims that Google and their car-mounted camera invaded her privacy.
Interviewed in the New York Times she said:
“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,”
“The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”
She might have a point. Wired magazine is currently running a contest that lets readers submit their favourite Google Street View images. Some of them are fairly banal but a few could raise the hackles of privacy advocates or lead to inadvertent consequences (e.g. workers caught doing something prohibited on a lunch break, a philanderer caught in a tryst, kids skipping school, etc.)
Google insists that it's doing everything it can to protect people's privacy and users can report 'inappropriate' images found on Street View but judging from the comments on this post on the popular blog Boing Boing, that may not be enough.
(Street View screen grab of Times Square)
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