Smile, you're on Google Street View

A man is driving along when he spots two hookers. The camera zooms in on his face and captures his expression as he drives up to them. The exact location is pinpointed on a map. How embarrassing these pictures  (see #22) would be in the wrong hands! Well, it's too late to worry about it. The world is laughing: Smile, sir, you're on Google Street View .

These 360-degree pictures of locations seen from the ground extend Google Map's usual overhead satellite image and matching map to the street level. Taken while driving through the streets using car-mounted panoramic cameras, the pictures are static, not webcams monitoring real-time scenes. Still, like any snapshot, they might unintentionally invade people's personal space and catch them off-guard. Data filters are supposed to blur faces and license plates to avoid recognition, but accidents will happen. So is the amusing person in the picture really relevant to us? Of course not. We're just checking how a place looks before we go there to have dinner or to find a new business location.

When Google announced last week that it would launch Street View in 20 German cities by the end of 2010, it set off a heated political debate on privacy. One politician complained the service would disclose information that would help burglars. Google doesn’t see a problem: The images are of people and things in plain view from the street, so there's no confidential information at stake. In addition, anyone can report inappropriate images. Yet Google is a big money-driven corporation, and information privacy and data protection are civil liberties in conflict with the interests of marketing. The gouvernment should be worrying about what Google is doing with undisclosed user information rather than trying to stop an application that will be very popular. And our politicians should finally begin a proper debate about our web-driven "culture of publicness" to help them figure out how to protect our interests.

Is privacy a luxury in the age of Google Street View? Test your related vocabulary in our collocation and translation exercise on the next page.

Anne Hodgson