Google Maps StreetView Privacy Issues
This link illustrates some of the potential concerns with Google Maps new StreetView.
Personally I like the approach of this guy — maybe it is true that in a world where we have ubiquitous information, anonymity comes with overflowing the buffers of the observers.
This is something that we have been coming to terms with for a while. Records such as court records that were once theoretically available freely were in practice quite hard to come by. You had to go to the court in question and apply for the paper copies. Now as they become available freely and electronically, there are new considerations.
For example, over on Groklaw the addresses and phone numbers of court staff and lawyers are available in the court records which are now available for easy download. This could be a serious issue in a controversial case.
I’m not sure what the long term prospect is. I suspect that we will just become used to the fact that a lot of what we do is visible. The blogsphere proves that many of us are comfortable sharing extraordinary amounts of personal information with the world as a whole.
Interesting times.
June 1st, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I think the whole thing is so sad. We have no boundries anymore, where is the peace? Where is privacy? No wonder rape is so common…. we don’t know where to stop anymore on any level. To the point we don’t know invasions are wrong and therefore don’t report it or try to change or stop it. How sick are we? Very, very sad.