In the interest of time, here are just a few quick thoughts off the top of my head... Yes, as with any type of surveillance-based service such as this, there will always be privacy concerns. Here are just three of them.

1. Individuals did not provide consent to have their private homes photographed/filmed and published. Many of the images include information that clearly identifies the individuals who live in the homes. Obtaining consent to use personally identifying information (PII), such as is represented in many of these images, is a basic privacy concept in most data protection (privacy) laws throughout the world.


2. Many of the images are clearly not up-to-date. For my own residence, the image provided is around 5 years old and looks very different today. That's fine by me, but if entities start using such images to make business decisions, investigation plans, law enforcement actions and so on, then they could be making some very poor judgments, and the people who live in the corresponding homes could suffer an injustice or unfair decision as a result.


3. Many of the images provide information about the home, vehicles, and other property, that could be used for malicious purposes, such as committing burglaries, hate crimes and so on. The images within cities are likely, and look, to be current as opposed to the images of small towns and in rural areas. Some of the images I saw included open garage doors with clear views of the contents, open windows, and even broken doors. True, these things could also be viewed by someone driving by, but by putting all these images in one place on a website, it creates the opportunity for someone to case a neighborhood much more quickly and identify vulnerabilities in homes from the comfort of their own computer desk. The ease of planning crime based upon a person's residence, perhaps even behind privacy fences, has now been made much easier by putting onto the Internet images that could not be seen by just driving or walking by the properties.

That said, the walking directions, in written narrative form, are quite helpful. If I wanted to determine the shortest running path from one point to another, seeing the map and written directions would be quite handy.

The privacy concerns come into play when the clear and close up images of homes, and all their vulnerabilities and even contents in some instances, are provided. Some of the terrain views provide as much detail about a person's home and yard as if the owners had mounted their own CCTV on their light pole!

Clearly my views are quite different than the legal-centric opinion of the Ponemon Institute representative who was quoted in the article.

There can be privacy concerns in situations where no laws are explicitly being violated, and often there are; such has been the case for as long as privacy has been a concern.

Organizations need to go beyond just the consideration of whether or not what they are doing, with images that involve individuals and their homes, is breaking a law. If lawfully publishing a person's home, or place of work, can lead to bad decisions and possible crime, that should also be a consideration.

While visiting U.C. Berkeley early this year I saw some great technologies that they were researching and developing that addressed these types of issues and could be used to blur the portions of the images that would be invading on the privacy of individuals. It would be good for Google to use these types of available privacy-preserving technologies with their Google Walking Directions tool.

What are your thoughts? What would the Google street level shots capture in your neighborhood? At your workplace? Is your organization using the Google satellite views, or street level views, to make business decisions? Perhaps for mortgage or other types of loans applicants?