'Weirded out' by Google snooping

Wired: Does your bum look big in this Google search? When Google presented the limited launch of their new Google Maps Street View feature, it was, as ever, expecting the unexpected, writes Danny O'Brien.

One of the charming institutional characteristics of the search engine giant, left over from its more innocent days, is its encouragement of re-uses of its features. Competitors and upstarts alike are generally allowed to remix and hack at its offerings, and the company will rarely stomp on such uses.

But it may not have been quite prepared for the responses of unease and even shock that accompanied the announcement. "Dear Google: You are now officially starting to weird me out" was one colleague's response.

So what, exactly, has freaked out the world? In San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Denver and Miami, Google Maps users can now pan and zoom around accurate photographs of the majority of the city's streets. Look at a map, click a couple of buttons, and you can scroll a 360 degree view of what any intersection looks like.

There has been similar projects before. Microsoft's Live Maps offers detailed aerial photography, and Amazon's A9 project offered streetfront imagery long before Google. But Google's views, which can be magnified and explored with videogame like interfaces, are somehow more disturbing - and potentially invasive.

Faces are recognisable. Hundreds of passersby are caught in the act by Google's panoramic snapshots.

Google watchers quickly found images of people entering adult book stores and leaving strip clubs, sunbathing in bikinis, and even apparently breaking into homes (although possibly their own).

Under US law, which holds very little expectation of privacy in public places, what Google is doing is perfectly legal. But the shock of discovering that a hidden photographer has frozen you and your neighbours in the act, and then knitted it into a world-viewable, world-famous application, is something that goes beyond legal or illegal. It feels disturbingly different.

And seeing the device Google used to collate their knowledge: an unmarked van with a peculiar, multi-eyed prong poking out of it, does not exactly help. It certainly freaks me out.

Of course, Google is just doing what Google does - collecting and collating the world's information. And it's doing it in the way that it always has - without explicit permission. Websites don't give Google permission to have their content scanned. No one gave Google permission to scoop up and index the archives of Usenet, the original internet discussion forums, either.

And, much to the chagrin of some publishers, Google isn't asking for permission to scan their books, either.

What Google does instead is ask forgiveness. There's a hidden-away button on the Street View screen that lets you petition to have an image removed if you find it offensive or invasive. The company has always let you remove websites you didn't want to be indexed. But it fights back against the principle that it should always ask permission first.

Google's Street View is a very public depiction of what Google does behind closed doors the rest of the time: collect and process information from as many sources as it can. A rare glimpse of the company's search gurus in a New York Times profile gave a glimpse of quite how heavily it pores over the wealth of information it gathers on its users. The order in which search results are provided to you, the article intimate, are determined by your previous searches. And the company wants more information on you: "We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don't know enough about you," said its chief executive, Eric Schmidt in London last week, "that is the most important aspect of Google's expansion".

Google's avarice for knowledge is clear and its willingness to push up against the legal definitions, and our own perceptions of privacy, is becoming clearer. But perhaps they are just the harbingers of a new age which we have already entered.

Should Google's snooping extend to taking photographs of every inch of New York? Or Dublin? Before we decide that this one company (and, no doubt, all the other companies eager to reduplicate the effort) has to be held back by law, we should consider that our public spaces are already photographed, surveilled and videoed without our explicit permission.

Compared to the US, closed-circuit television cameras already monitor many of us in much of our meanderings. The primary difference is that we never get to see those recordings and what is done with them is never revealed.

Google may be secretive, but it does at least attempt to sell us back what it has learnt. No government or law-enforcement agency has any need to do such a thing.

John Battelle, the veteran search engine watcher, asked how the public would react if it was the FBI or NSA who were recording every street corner? Perhaps we should turn the question around. Why are we only worried now that Google has got into the game?