1/6- Oh COOL, Google Street View?

We should all know that google has launched their new application called "Google Street View". Google Street View shows images provided by special patrol cars with roof-mounted 360-degree cameras, which take pictures of every road and street in the cities we drive through. People simply type in an address, and then it can be viewed as an ordinary map, a satellite image, or a 3D photograph.

The first time I went on the "Google Street View" website, I thought that it'd looked pretty cool. I tried to search up my address to see my house, but it wouldn't show up. It's probably because I moved into a new town house and they haven't updated it. Even if I can't see my house, I can see other places where I usually go. I think that this application is exciting because you can see your family members and friends houses and you can also see if they're in the picture! Thus, if I were in a public space without being aware, I think that I would feel exposed because everyone can see what you're doing without your permission. And people can just stalk you randomly and you won't even know. The disadvantages of Google Street View would be that there would be no privacy. Our community members house, faces, and their plate numbers will be shown through the Web. Even if their faces are blurred out and their cars, I think that it is still wrong to put images like that on the Web because people will know who you are and can just follow you that quick! Even if I think that this website is cool, I don't think that it's right for Google to post images on websites, where everyone will be able to have an access to it. Google recognizes privacy concerns, but claims to address them through their collection and processing approach: (1) public access images, no different than what would normally be seen walking down the street. (2) not in real time, so images can be months old befor going live. (3) allowing removal requests, through the "Report a Problem" option in the bottom-left of all images.

In conclusion, I realized that it is unreasonable to object to this as a privacy violation, for reasons that are especially clear in this particular case. Quite literally, there is going to be a nearly "one-to-one" correlation between the Google Street View dataset and the real world. Thus, while your image might be available to everybody, so are millions of other images. One might expect that at any given moment, the proportion of people interested in the Google picture of the specific place you were the day the google car spotted you is very roughly the same as those interested in that specific spot in real life at any given moment. Thus, for exactly the same reason you only saw a few people on the street with you at the moment the picture was taken, it's likely only a few people are interested, at one time, in that picture. We have to stop treating publication on the internet as a black-or-white phenomenon when it comes to privacy because it is rapidly gaining the presence of physical in terms of our communications and our expectations for online privacy will have to adopt some shades of grey if we were to avoid a disputable free-for-all. Just as there can be relative degrees of invisibility in physical space, we must recognize that the same concept can exist in virtual spaces!