Google Streetview comes to the UK

If you live in the UK its pretty difficult not to have noticed the controversy surrounding Google Streetview. Streetview was released in the UK a few weeks ago with the intention of giving users a kind of 360 degree tour of some major cities. People in the UK have always valued their privacy ever since the introduction of CCTV cameras into city centers and of course some people see the Streetview cars as just another invasion.

In some ways you can see why a kind of immediate risk is that everyone out there in internet land can see your home and potentially access points to your property, just having images of your house online even if people don’t know thats where you live can make you feel vunerable. Has life online gone too far?

Streetview has also of course given rise to impromptu captures of some rather embarrassing things such as those highlighted in The Times Online’s article ‘10 bizzare sights in Google Streetview’.

There are also some technical limitations to streetview – you can only go where the Streetview photo cars have gone, in a way this feels like being in a video game where you reach the edges of the map of an apparently free running game. However I do think one aspect of Streetview thats become overlooked is the removal system, Google are all too happy say how ‘easy’ it is – they even appeared on Newsnight on BBC 2 to explain how simple the process is, but what about all those people who don’t have access to the internet. For example what if my Grandmothers house appeared on Google Streetview, she doesn’t use the Internet and shes also very old. Its unlikely that she’d have the choice to remove her house from the system unless myself or one of my family members did it for her. Maybe if she had the Streetview system explained to her she might even worry about people being able to view her house online, the the UK’s privacy laws aren’t there to protect the majority of citizens but the most vulnerable members of our community such as children and the elderly.

It is questionable the amount of ‘damage’ a project like Streetview will do – after all whats the difference between someone coming along and painting or taking a picture of your house and uploading it on the internet as art. Maybe its just more sinister that a company would choose to do it and it makes us wonder about their underlying motives.

Whatever the outcome its unlikely that people will stop protesting, it’ll be interesting to see how Streetview progresses in the future and how from a historical point of view it provides snapshots of the kind of lives we live today.

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