Since the launch of Google’s Street View five months ago, they have faced biting criticism from privacy advocates.
Apparently Street View has caught people in compromising situations (e.g.- pictures of sunbathers, people leaving ‘adult’ book stores, etc.). Sadly, that loss of privacy in public spaces now extends to Phoenix.
Add temple attendance in Mesa, Arizona to the list of compromising situations captured on Google Street View.
Check out this link to Google Street View and be sure to click on the gold stick figure to see the shocking and compromising photographs of people entering and leaving the temple.
I can only imagine what will come next–wedding photos in front of the temple!?!?!
Given the proclivity for temple attendance by endowed members of the Church, I predict more compromising pictures caught on Google’s Street View.
Your city and temple could be next!
You have been warned! š
All I have to say is I’m very disappointed the temple was built on LeSewer Ave. Oh, it’s Leseuer. Never mind.
Be nice, now. The Lesueurs who settled Mesa take pride in the address of the temple. š
As funny as you can make this out to be, I rather imagine that (especially if they figure out how to update the views more often: yet another reason not to support city-wide CCTV networks) this can easily be used for some pretty sinister purposes, at little risk to the individual perpetrators. How tempting would it be to try and get a good look at every person who was going into a polling location on election day? Or examining the photo of that church that sponsors AA/NA meetings? Or the door to a battered women’s shelter? Or the house your ex-husband is living in? Like sex offender registries and donor lists from political campaigns that are published online, this stuff being so easily available requires a lot more self-discipline and integrity from the viewer than I think we can reasonably anticipate every user (or even most users) to actually display. And the people taking the photographs in question can’t really be expected to research every location and scrutinize every photo to ensure that it can’t be used like that — any more than a case worker can keep a troubled teen’s home address off a sex offender website just because she knows that in this one case it’d do more harm than good.
Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised to read a “what have we wrought” piece of self-flagellation in the NYT from the folks behind this project, in twenty years or so. Especially since we’ve already had something similar from the guy who wrote the original email protocols, and the worst thing that happened from that was a dramatic loss of overall productivity and the rise of a whole new kind of spam.
Sarah, are you arguing that people have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Is a battered women’s shelter identified by a sign on the front door (I am not aware of any)? Is it possible to distinguish a weeknight group of worshipers from AA/NA members? Do you recommend legislation to control programs like Google Street View?
Just curious. I’m interested to hear your views on this.
If one could time it right, they could get a whole lot of free advertising. If one knew the person/people involved in doing this imaging (or the people doing the imaging sold/published the information on when the imaging was taking place) then one could stand in or position themselves in a particular place and end up on google maps. If the placement was subtle and strategic enough then it surely wouldnt be censored out, and could then be exploited by the interested parties. Think about it, what do these people driving these cars make? Like $20/hour? Enterprising driver lists offer in City X’s Craig’s List to reveal time of imaging to anyone willing to shell out $1000 cash, several people take them up on it and position themselves on the streets of City X and then are immortalized on the internets. They send links out to all their friends and family, or start some viral campaign on their strategic placement. An anti-mormon standing in front of the temple who got imaged at just the right time with a placard facing the right way could really irritate a lot of Mormons….not that they like doing things like that.
If they did street views of our local Wal-Mart on Sundays, eventually you could put together a complete photo directory for my ward.
Kurt, I almost wonder if Google isn’t planning some subtle and strategic marketing of their own (or selling advertising for Street Views). I will be interested to see who the first person/company will be to do what you suggest.
Tossman, LOL! What time should we look for you at Wal Mart? š
When my ox is in the mire, you’ll find me at a non-local Wal-Mart. It’s a longer drive but definitely less awkward (it’s a little unnerving to run into your Elders Quorum secretary in electronics- I mean, what do you say?).
Brian D.:
There’s a difference between an expectation of privacy (in a USSC decision sort of sense) and the traditional absence of continual passive surveillance. The expectation of privacy has been used to talk about, for instance, whether the police can listen to a conversation or look inside a car parked on the street — or whether a company can publish your image if it was taken in “public.” It’s a very narrow definition, and relies in part on my favoritest legal fiction ever, the “reasonable person.” I suspect, however, that even the reasonable person (who thinks he’s free to leave as soon as they come to a stop, when he’s the passenger in a car that the police have pulled over) would find the idea of continual surveillance in all public places (with the attendant newfound ability to track someone everywhere they go) to be deeply disturbing.
The way street view works right now, privacy concerns are a matter of individual photos: the van came by right at the time you happened to be sunbathing. It’s a little creepy, but the overall actual impact is quite low. I’m more concerned about what happens next — the part where any user can submit a cell phone image to Google Maps and their cell phone’s GPS data will let Google figure out where the photo was taken, and photo analysis software will compare the photo to existing photos from that same location, and it’ll incorporate that new photo into a “Recent Views” tab that shows you not only the most recent photos submitted, but also shows you what direction they were taken in and the addresses involved. (*) I’m concerned about the police deciding (since they already have the data!) to release all their CCTV images to Google, figuring that at least some of the time, someone will see a crime in progress and alert them sooner than they’d be able to find it out themselves. And so forth.
I don’t think there should be legislation — but I do worry about what sort of environment I’ll be living in in 20 years, and I don’t intend to believe the present-day version of “oh, we’ll only use this number for the purpose of tracking your benefits, it’ll never be used as ID, don’t worry!” style reassurances. I’d like people to think just a little bit harder about the potential negative effects of new technology (that wouldn’t happen without their active participation) before they drink themselves to oblivion over their role in the bombing of Hiroshima. But legislation is generally like using a mallet when a set of small electronics screwdrivers are needed, and anyway I’m a libertarian. I’ll just have to walk around with a cloth over my face and buy everything in cash and put up so many trees on the outside of my property that Street View thinks there’s a forest instead of a house there.
A technical point on the AA/NA scenario: all you need to know is what time the photo was taken, which is usually easy to tell from context — the photos of my grandfather’s childhood home were taken around 3pm on a weekday; if I looked at it more closely for delivery trucks and the like, I could probably get it down to a particular day. I might be able to get it to a particular date, if I were in the neighborhood: I know, for instance, that I was in a specific building at the exact moment the older Google Maps satellite view of Disneyland was taken (I have a record of every place I worked when I was there, there was a parade getting ready to go backstage, there were a couple of construction projects going, it was around 10am from the shadows, but the park was already in full operation, which meant it had to be a weekend…) The names and identities are supposed to be confidential, but the locations and times of meetings are widely advertised. If it’s Tuesday, 6:30pm, the steps of St. Michaels, and you’ve got a flyer with the details, you know exactly what all the people going in are for. Or at least you could tell yourself that — and what happens when the lunatic fringe guy refuses to hire someone he saw in that photo, believing him/her to be a recovering heroin addict?
(*) Incidentally, Flickr is becoming integrated with Yahoo! maps: if you were on the Bonneville Salt Flats on a particular day in August around 11am, my friends and family now know exactly where you were, within about three meters (and by the way, whoever you are, I was impressed by how thoroughly your child was washing her feet — it seems like a rare thing for a kid so young to be so exacting about.) This is why I have my entire photo collection set to “friends and family only.” Most people don’t bother with that much protection.
Oh, forgot — women’s shelters are more or less the same situation as AA meeting spots, except that they are always a shelter (whereas AA meeting spots are generally multi-use.) And in my not-all-that-impractical nightmare scenario, you just need to be enough of a horrible person to follow someone you know is going there once, and then you have that information. Meanwhile, the address where you take children to when you think they’ve been sexually abused, in a county near mine, is plastered all over their website; Planned Parenthood advertises in the campus newspaper, and Project OpenHand (which distributes nutritionally superior food to people with AIDS) does, in fact, have a sign on the door, as does Stonewall (they have a flag, too.)
Sarah, thank you for explaining your concerns and the wonderful explanation. I share some of your concerns.
If I have more time later today, I will respond in more detail.
If only this had been taken during the marathon weekend–you could have seen be doing laps around the temple!
“Incidentally, Flickr is becoming integrated with Yahoo! maps: if you were on the Bonneville Salt Flats on a particular day in August around 11am, my friends and family now know exactly where you were, within about three meters (and by the way, whoever you are, I was impressed by how thoroughly your child was washing her feet — it seems like a rare thing for a kid so young to be so exacting about.) This is why I have my entire photo collection set to “friends and family only.” Most people don’t bother with that much protection.”
Flickr doesn’t know where your pictures were taken unless you tell it. So if you’re worried just don’t go to that extra trouble of telling it. If I told you a photo was taken in Florida when it was really California, you’d think it as taken in Florida. I think you’re overreacting.
#10 Sarah:
Why should anyone be ashamed to be seen entering or exiting a GLBT community center, such as Stonewall?
Sarah, I’m not sure I know what kind of privacy in public a “reasonable person” expects, and I’m not sure the courts have a definitive answer either (any of our ‘Nacle lawyers care to chime in?). If a photographer is stalking, harrassing someone or playing the role of a peeping tom, that is an entirely different matter, of course. But, if I as a private citizen, or even a business owner, wants to take pictures around the community and publish them, what is stopping me from doing so?
Hmm, regarding #12, mmiles is short for “Moroni miles.”
#13 – I don’t mind that Flickr knows that my little sister and I were on the Bonneville Salt Flats on a particular day, which is why I tagged it. The people who happened to be in the background of my photo, however, had no choice in whether it got tagged with their latitude and longitude and the date stamp from my camera — and their stalker/boss/parent/spouse/professor/whatever could learn things they didn’t intend for general broadcast from that picture.
#14 – I hope I didn’t make it seem like you should be ashamed to walk out of Stonewall or Project OpenHand (or whatever’s) office: I’ve done it myself, and I don’t think it’s something to be ashamed of. ^_^ However, I do think there are people out there who think that being gay is unnatural and perverted and a crime worthy of actual violence, and they might react in foreseeable and horrific ways when given the chance to identify someone whom they assume is gay from the comfort of their living room. Google is certainly making it easier for them. I don’t think AA meeting attendance is something to be ashamed of, and I don’t think that AA’s general principle of anonymity is in place for reasons of shame (any more than HIPAA is about how embarrassing it is to have leukemia.)
#15 – I rather hope that the difference between a random business owner (or other photographer) taking individual random shots and putting them up on their own site, and a company taking millions of photos, all with date/time/geographic tagging, and turning the results into a service which is meant to allow you to look at any street in an entire city — and the potential to expand that to effective universal surveillance — would be obvious. ^_^
Amongst other things, what a service like Street View could do (especially with a few largely trivial enhancements) is remove nearly all the barriers to entry for actual stalkers, harassers, and peeping Toms — and moreover, make the collection of all the stuff they’d need to do their “work” both common and impossible to criminalize. If everyone is pulling up near real-time photos of your front door (or front doors in general,) the crazy guy who thinks you love him and is willing to kill your husband to prove he’s worthy of your admiration can do so, too (specifically, do so without fear of having a cop knock on his car window to tell him to go away, while his partner pulls up the license plate and realizes that there’s a protection order out against this particular nutcase.)
Again: I don’t think there should be legislation. I do think Google could do this in a better way — immediate solutions range from doing two or three passes to allow the creation of composite images that have no trucks, people, etc. in them, to just taking the photos around 6am on Saturday mornings (or whatever.) Recent developments have made the last solution I heard from them (blurring faces and license numbers on an individual basis) somewhat problematic, though even blurring would address most of my particular concerns.
And I don’t think that privacy and safety concerns in the face of some pretty massive expansions in surveillance culture should be met with nothing more than grins.
“I don’t mind that Flickr knows that my little sister and I were on the Bonneville Salt Flats on a particular day, which is why I tagged it. The people who happened to be in the background of my photo, however, had no choice in whether it got tagged with their latitude and longitude and the date stamp from my camera — and their stalker/boss/parent/spouse/professor/whatever could learn things they didn’t intend for general broadcast from that picture.”
You’re talking about something very random. So you’re worried that the two German tourists that are 10-20 feet behind you in the photo might be seen by their boss in your photo? The photo that this boss randomly stumbled upon after Googling “flats”?
I understand the importance of privacy, but we’re still in a place that you really have to try to put this information out there.
Does anyone recognize this street view?
www (dot) tinyurl (dot) com/2ndu94