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Concerns with Google Earth
By Julie | June 5, 2007
The latest round of privacy (and other) concerns of various types are now hitting Google Earth:
- Salon discusses how the alleged plot against JFK airport was being plotted with the images on Google Earth.
- CNN discusses the ick factor of finding nosepickers in action on Google Earth imagery.
The first isn’t truly a privacy concern, but it crosses over into the concepts of how reliable GPS is set up to be, and government oversight (or wish to borrow) the data streams collected by a search engine.
The second does get into privacy. CNN itself covers it. If a picture is at the wrong time, we can identify people getting medical treatment, etc. Now, sure, they’re walking into a public door. But there’s still a sense of that being a moment, and not captured in an image to be searchable for a long time. There’s a lot to be said for people’s sense of moment vs. memory — I did entire papers on such subjects as an undergrad lit major, and the reason it’s so thematic in literature is because it’s a truism of the human condition.
It’s interesting to see how more broad-market publications are starting to look at these issues. It makes me wonder when they’ll hit more of personalized search.
Topics: data collection, google, local search, privacy, search engine features, tinfoil hats, web 2.0 |
