Richard Chirgwin11 August 2008, 2:30 PM
OPINION | Google's Streetview, just launched in Australia and Japan, is creeping a lot of people out. And it should. Something's just not right.
So What's Wrong with StreetView? If you want to understand why “Joe Sixpack” might feel uneasy about Google StreetView, you need to do something that rarely happens in the IT industry. Instead of turning to the mirror, we need to imagine the world from Joe's point of view, with all his irrational likes and dislikes.
Whether all of the ordinary citizen's responses to StreetView are strictly “right or wrong” in rational terms, it's worth understanding the feelings that might provoke them against it.
So I'm going to try and put forward a few ways in which StreetView looks different to similar activities that wouldn't give Joe Sixpack even a moment's unease.
Alarming scale
Whether reasonably or not, people do feel differently about having the pics of their homes published worldwide, compared to any one person at any one time deciding to walk down the street and take a photo.
Sure, anyone could find someone else's address in the phone book (unless they use an unlisted number). Sure, you could go to that street, take a photo, and put it on your personal Website. But it's fair to say that Google is acting on a completely different scale to someone looking you up in the phone book: it's taken hundreds of thousands of photos, and instead of posting them on a personal Website that nobody looks at, it's put them in front of millions and millions of eyeballs.
And Joe perceives, reasonably or otherwise, a lack of reciprocity. What Google can do to you, you can't do to Google – which almost anyone will find emotionally provocative. This leads me to my second point.
Powerlessness
If an individual is hanging around your street acting creepy, you don't feel powerless to stop them. If a company passes by when you're not home, and later you find it's decided to publish the photo of your home on the Internet, what can you do?
Sure, you can “request” that Google remove your house from StreetView. There are two problems with this. First, after Google says “no”, what do you do? Second, as someone of my acquaintance has found, Google's response is likely to be in the very best traditions of American corporate bureaucracy: it took down exactly the one photo that showed one house from one angle – and every other photo in the street identifying the house remained in place.
Making people feel powerless — in fact, rubbing their noses in it ("Google hasn't broken any laws, what we're doing is completely legal, of course we will comply with any reasonable instructions, but in this particular case we've broken no laws and we're not going to take down the image you've objected to) — understandably provokes feelings of resentment.
People are especially touchy about this because they end up feeling powerless most of the time. Don't like the development application that the state government pushed through? Tough. Your suburb is going to be cut in half by freeway? Tough. You suffer from crap public transport? Tough. Don't like StreetView? Tough.
Google is touching people very close to their hearts, and people feel it's saying "tough" wherever it can.
Another point about powerlessness: from Joe Sixpack's point of view, not only does Google do what it likes, but it has a bunch of FWTs (fans with typewriters) who make fun of anyone who doesn't like what Google does. This may be unfair to the media – but it's when journalists say to the world at large “get over it”, we're revealing ourselves as out-of-touch and uninterested in how people feel.
So many aspects of the 'home life' have already been eroded that people have become very, very sensitive to questions of privacy: it feels like privacy is all they have left to them.
That might not be rational, but I don't particularly expect or demand that ordinary people are rational about all things. Nor is it fair to demand perfect rationality at all times, which brings me to my next point.
Fairness
If Joe Sixpack says "My kids' sports club has banned cameras because of creeps, but Google can do what it likes. How is that fair?" it's hard to come up with a response. Telling him “it's not fair, get over it” makes the commentator sound just as arrogant as Google.
And there are plenty of stories of people who have been prevented by security goons from taking "unauthorised" photos of public buildings (even though the security goons have no particular legal right to do so – for example, if someone other than a policeman man-handles a citizen without a really good reason, it's an assault. Quoth Joe Sixpack: "So how come Google takes photos of private homes, and nobody stops them, and we just have to put up with it?"
It's not fair.
Yet another example of how the public might feel there's something unfair about all this: if someone puts (say) the Opera House on a postcard, they pay a fee. Google's going to make money out of photos of peoples' houses and we can't get a fee. Fair?
So I think there is a at least a justifiable feeling Google is behaving i