Google Street View and Privacy

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In May 2007, Google added an innovative feature to Google Maps, called Google Street View. Street View provides 360 degree views of addresses from street level. Google cites many possible uses for the technology, such as showing long-distance friends and family your house, checking out the handicapped accommodations at establishments in advance, or previewing potential vacation rentals. Street View is available for most major metropolitan areas in the United States as well as selected countries abroad. As with any project that has a scope as grand as Street View’s. Google’s new technology has some drawbacks. Google’s methodology to collect all of these images was to pay people to drive around in cars that had cameras mounted on their roofs. As a result, many of the images contain people going about their daily lives, unaware that they are being photographed. This causes some people concern over their privacy. These fears are unfounded, however, as Google has worked very hard to ease people’s concerns. Ultimately, the utility of the service outweighs the privacy concerns of a small group of people. This paper outlines the privacy rights of United States citizens regarding Street View, what Google has done to address privacy concerns, and then offers a recommendation on whether Google has done enough to address these privacy concerns.

Google has implemented a number of features to address the privacy concerns of the public. The company has worked very hard to ‘anonymize’ the available data using their face and license plate blurring technologies. These make it difficult to recognize people or their cars from photos in Street View. To check that this blurring technology is doing its job correctly, however, Google must keep the origi...

... middle of paper ...

...oogle just does this on a much larger and more permanent scale. Google has developed face and license plate blurring technology in addition to their ‘report problem’ feature to deal with privacy issues. The usefulness of Google Street View trumps the small percentage of images that may be offensive or an invasion of privacy, and with a vigilant community policing the images, these can be eliminated over time as well.

Works Cited http://www.google.com/press/streetview/ http://www.google.com/corporate

http://www.gstreetsightings.com

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/06/street-view-exploring-europes- streets.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,676616,00.html

http://www.photoattorney.com/2005/09/rights-of-privacy-concerns-for.html

https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10024294-93.html

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