Google Street View and privacy

Among the odd lawsuits and tribulations going on in the world this week is one that really caught my eye, the story of a frenchman that was caught peeing in his yard by Google Street View and became the object of ridicule in his small village. This is certainly not the first issue raised about Google's popular service, some of the other incidents include a man climbing in to the trunk of his car naked and a married couple, coincidentally with the last name Boring, who had resented Google allowing anyone to see the front of their house on street view.

Inmost of these cases it is easy to see why they would like these photos taken down, in two of the incidents I mentioned, it is likely that people all over the world saw their unfortunate embarrassing side. Google already tries to keep people's identity hidden on Street View, faces are automatically detected by a computer and blurred, and although this measure does work a lot of the time it is not always foolproof as in the case of the frenchman caught peeing, who was identified because he was caught on his own property in a small village in France.

Being photographed in public is not so much of a issue as identification and recording of oneself is to be expected in public, but the prevalence of these actions in the digital age is an issue that is quite scary. Will people become so accustomed to having more and more of their public movements recorded that the more controversial privacy issues will go unnoticed? Google Street View just offers a snapshot stuck in a point in time, the only time you can be recorded by it is if you happen to be around one of their camera cars at the right moment of the right day and never else but this isn't the only way people are being recorded in public, around England the government has set up CCTV cameras in a lot of public areas under the guise of stopping crime, who knows what is to come in the future.

Privacy is an important subject, no one can ever dismiss the immense danger in people's private information becoming public without their willingness, but the line between what hurts privacy and what doesn't is becoming ever more so blurred. Google Street View is a simple idea, drive a car around in public snapping pictures as they go, but it has drawn a lot of controversy in certain cases where people have been captured doing what they didn't want anyone seeing or have had photos of their private property potentially taken from outside the public areas uploaded and publicly accessible on the site.

 Is this purely Google's fault or is there some element that the public needs to get involved with? Does Street View's benefits outweigh the risks in privacy? Do you know the answer?