timwarr.net

Note: Details in this post may have been changed to protect privacy!

I’m no Google fan boy, but the one thing I seem to be always defending is Google Street View. It really is not that big an invasion of privacy compared to CCTV although you have to admire this rather more direct Austrian response to Street View.

There seem to be endless stories in the mainstream press about privacy/security violations from Street View.  However a little thought and investigation usually reveals they are nonsense.  In fact should that not be the journalists job?

So this blog post in got geoint caught my eye, it points to a cnet story, which in turn points to story in the Daily Telegraph.  In this  story someone states that their mountain bike was stolen from their garage and say this is because their open garage appeared on Street View and you could see the contents.

As the victim says:

“When you look at the photograph, my face is blacked out, the windows of my house are blacked out but because the garage door was left open, you can clearly see everything in there.

“I would argue that they should have blacked that out. It is just an invitation for any criminal to take what they like.”

He has very sensibly:

“…now removed anything of value.”

And of course I am sure he used the simple link in Street View to request removal of the image.

Reading the article more closely I noticed that he reveals the following personal data:

• Firstname
• Surname
• Age
• Profession
• The Street he lives on (and there is only one with that name in the UK)
• The county he lives in

Oooops – that is a lot more privacy gone…  So then I wondered, can I find this offending image on Google Maps?  Well it took about 3 minutes:

copyright google

All I had to do was a google search for the street name and then browse along it, using street view, until I found an open garage.  And there it was…  Oh, and I now know his house number too…

So he was so busy complaining about the evils of google he forgot to ask them to remove the image and revealed yet  more personal details in a national newspaper.  Nice one!

Before I get accused of invading his privacy further I have requested removal of the image on his behalf using this easy approach.  And I have not repeated any of the information!

So please could we just get over this privacy paranoia and start using Street View as the great dataset it is.  Remember it is almost the same debate we are having now when we first had caller id and now that is just another tool of our lives…

BTW nearby I discovered this amusing scene:

copyright google

I wonder how they ended up there?

Incidentally I have had 2 mountain bikes stolen from a garage about 12 years before anyone ever thought of street view.  My tip – keep your bikes in your house!

Update 15/4/10

Following my image removal request I have now had an email response from the Google Map Team:

Our records show that you recently reported an image within Google Maps Street View. This image has been removed from our service and will disappear within the next 24 hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and appreciate your patience while we dealt with this.

If you still see the image after 24 hours, your browser’s cache may cause the issue. Please clear your browser’s cache and check the image. To clear the cache, please check the link below.

A nice, simple and reasonably fast service.

Update 16/4/10

And now the image has been removed by the Google Maps Team:

I am now not sure if I have helped someone save their privacy or needlessly damaged a dataset in the public domain. I can’t decide…