Google has us all in its web

Google’s new Street View service - which displays 360-degree photographs of streetscapes in 25 British towns - has made it a challenge getting pages proof-read in the Wired offices this week.

First, we spot the magazine’s associate editor in a skirt in a West London street (to be fair, he insists it is a kilt). Then we discover that Google’s face-blurring algorithm has bizarrely pixellated Bobby Sands’s face on a Belfast mural, presumably to protect what the software assumes is his privacy.

But Simon Davies, who runs a generally estimable campaign group called Privacy International, isn’t much amused. Street View, Mr Davies complained to the information commissioner this week, “has created numerous instances of embarrassment and distress”, and so he pledged to bring a legal test case.

Why? A 15-year-old had complained to Privacy International that Google snapped him carrying a skateboard “which his parents had expressly forbade him from using”; oh, and a married man was captured “speaking at close proximity with a female colleague”. Forget ID cards, registers of children’s DNA and government trawling of our e-mails - in Street View, we have finally identified the ultimate threat to British citizens’ liberty.

Well, no, actually. Although some of those photographed exiting sex shops or being sick in pub car parks may have prompted panicked deletions by Google’s public-relations machine, the public sphere remains essentially public. Despite the creeping incursions of French-style privacy legislation, one can still lawfully capture images from and of the British public commons - so it’s an absurdity for those sneaking a work-break cigarette, or flirting at a bus stop, to claim that somehow their rights have been breached by a passing camera. A right to absolute privacy in public? Get over it. More

Privacy complaint over Street View

Who allowed Google to put my big knickers online?