Google Maps: An Invasion of Privacy?

Is that man breaking into an apartment building? Does that tollbooth operator realize she’s being photographed? And isn’t it illegal to have cameras in New York’s Brooklyn Battery tunnel?

Such questions have been raging online in recent weeks, as Google’s new” Street View” has sent techies scrambling to browse through the miles and miles of street-level photos now available through Google Maps. But while such blogs as BoingBoing.net and Mashable.com have made something of a joke out of the many humorous (a man apparently caught mid-sneeze), bizarre (the ghost of E.T.?) and lewd (a woman’s underwear poking out of her low-riding jeans) images captured by the web giant, privacy concerns have led many watchdog groups to quickly retort that Street View is no laughing matter.

“There is a serious tension here, between the concepts of free speech, and open information, and the idea of privacy,” says Kevin Bankston, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.” There’s definitely a privacy concern that an unmarked Google camera van can, and in fact has, captured images of people, whether in the street or in their homes, in a manner that could be embarrassing or even dangerous to them.” He adds: “We don’t think what Google’s done here is necessarily illegal, though a few images may cross the line and may create liability. It’s more that they’ve done something that’s really irresponsible and rude to people.”

Google has maintained that these street-view images were captured in broad daylight on public streets — hardly an invasion of privacy. Over several months, Google staff (who took shots in San Francisco), as well as employees of a third-party firm (which did the same in Miami, Denver, New York and Las Vegas), equipped vehicles in select cities with imaging equipment and drove the streets, snapping photos of everything in sight. At maps.google.com, users can drag a human figurine over one of the highlighted streets in those cities, and a window will open that displays the photo taken at that very spot. Users can then grab the image and spin it, turning 360 degrees to get a virtual tour of a given neighborhood, or click on a series of arrows to move up or down the street, one photo at a time.

Since everything happening in public on these city streets was fair game, it didn’t take long for web users to find peculiar and embarrassing images that raised questions about the ethics of the project. Stephen Chau, product manager for Google Maps, says this is less an attempt to infringe on people’s privacy than the company’s attempt to advance its core mission:” At Google, we take privacy very seriously,” Chau says. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property and is not real time. This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Still, Google has publicly noted that every Street View window contains a link to take users to a help page, where they can report “objectionable” images. Asked about how many images had been removed thus far due to reports from users, Chau could not offer an exact number but said it had been negligible. He noted that the company has received mostly positive feedback, suggesting visitors are using the product as it was intended. “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful… a significant amount of information can be found in mapping the world, by gaining a better understanding of the world in general,” he says.

To prove his point, Chau, who moved to San Francisco recently, pointed to the way he has personally used the service to learn more about his new city, virtually navigating through his neighborhood and even logging on before going to bed to zoom in on Google’s images of the parking signs lining his street, to make sure he won’t get a parking ticket in the morning.

Bankston, though, who himself is viewable on a street view photograph walking to work, says that these Street Views represent an ominous invasion of privacy. “We’re moving into a future where not only must you realize the risk that you might be photographed in public, but where it’s becoming a near certainty that you will be captured any time you go out,” he says. “It’s indicative of the direction in which we’re moving — where everything occurring anywhere is Google-able.”

Despite his concerns, Bankston says that Google could end the Street View controversy with a simple solution. “Just by obscuring the faces of people,” he says, “it would eliminate the privacy concerns of those attending an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting, leaving a reproductive health clinic or attending a controversial political event. Admittedly, it’s a difficult computational problem, to find a way to obscure every face that can be seen through Street View, but Google has perhaps the largest braintrust that has ever existed on the planet, and if anyone could solve the problem, it would certainly be the geniuses at the Google-plex.”