Google's "Street View" Zooms In Too Close for Some

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Google Zooms In Too Close for Some
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: June 1, 2007

....Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the “Best Urban Images” that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, “Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?”

Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” the company said. “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Google said that it had consulted with public service organizations and considered their feedback in developing the service, which allows users to request that a photo be removed for privacy reasons. A Google spokeswoman said the company had received few such requests....

***

There was the picture of a clearly identifiable man standing in front of an establishment offering lap dances and other entertainment in San Francisco. The site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

Others pointed to pictures of cars whose license plates were clearly readable....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/technology/01private.html

[Forkboy]

1. Welcome to the future...privacy has been a thing of the past for awhile now.

The average person is on a camera somewhere about a dozen times a day according to a story I read last year.

[Amy6627]

2. I heard on Mike Malloy the other day that British citizens are filmed

about 300 times each day. And in some area the cameras talk back when "Anti-Social" behavior is being done.

[Forkboy]

3. I've seen those....creepy shit.

:scared: