Google Street View: a Privacy Issue?

Google Street View: A Privacy Issue?

Christen Davis

CIS324

April 20, 2013

Professor Orth

Google Street View: A Privacy Issue?

I remember as a child, when my family would plan our yearly road trip to Florida for vacation, my father would go to the bookshelf and pull out the faithful atlas. He would plan out the best, and most scenic, route through each state. This required several hours of his time. Now, since most households own at least one computer, people turn to Google Maps. With the ease of entering a starting location and the ending destination, people could not only print a map, but could print turn by turn directions as well. But Google didn’t stop at just aerial or satellite views; they developed Google Street View (GSV), which allowed the viewer to see their location of interest at street level, with the ability to pan the view 360 degrees. According to Google.com, Street View was “just an experimental project, [where they] packed several computers into the back of a SUV, stuck some cameras, lasers and a GPS device on top and drove around collecting [their] first imagery.” They have since developed a fleet of cars, a trike, a trolley, a snowmobile, and a trekker. Just recently Google partnered with the Catlin Seaview Survey in order to take the Street View to the ocean.

Even though this new technology has created the ability to visit places without ever leaving the comforts of home, it has also created new privacy issues. Google’s claim that privacy and security are important to them has been marred by the recent findings that “payload data was secretly collected between 2007 and 2010 as part of [the] Street View [project]” (Streitfeld, 2012). At first, the company claimed no knowledge of the data harvesting, placing blame on a “rogue engineer.” But Streitfeld goes on to report that supervisors were aware and that the data was intentionally collected to “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Because the information was...