View printer friendly version |

The launch of Google’s StreetView mapping service has created its fair share of controversy and debate over the last couple of days, and whilst the inception of Google Maps’ satellite imaging a few years ago caused its own problems (with governments complaining bitterly about military secrets being revealed by the firm’s aerial photos), the ability to see the UK online, literally from street view, has been heralded by many as a further erosion of our personal privacy.

Whilst the technology behind the service includes automatic facial recognition software, which is intended to blur the faces of identifiable individuals, it’s fair to say that this has been pretty hit-and-miss.  Whilst most faces have been correctly identified, the cameras also managed to blur faces on billboards and murals, and even those of the Manchester United squad displayed outside Old Trafford.  To be perfectly honest, though, I’m not sure I’m particularly concerned about the whole thing.  Given that the pictures are fairly low resolution and have been taken by a car driving along a street, the argument that Christmas has come early for wannabe terrorists planning an attack on their local café seems a bit overblown.  When you consider how many times you’re caught on CCTV every day, and that the images on StreetView itself have generally been taken several months before they actually go online, I’d be willing to bet that other than potential candidates for ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals’, any crook with an ounce of intelligence would surely go to the trouble to scope out the area first-hand before putting their dastardly plan into action? 

Sure, if Google were to combine their mapping technology with some kind of live video feed, I’d be pretty worried, but that seems a long way off.  In actual fact, when I did spot somebody’s face which hadn’t been blurred, and used their ‘report image’ function, the response seemed almost too extreme, with half the street being blacked out within half-an-hour.  What’s really worrying is how easy it would be to activate an unwitting friend/family member’s mobile phone with Google’s Latitude, which lets you track their progress on a map and see exactly what they’ve been up to recently – the biggest problem with StreetMaps so far, other than the number of people who have been caught in compromising positions (coming out of strip clubs and breaking into houses) seems to be the fact that half of the UK’s working population spent the majority of last week playing around with it rather than actually doing any work!