Home

Google Street View: A Study in Privacy and Nerds

Google has taken a lot of flak over its Street View application which allows you to see a 360-degree panorama of the streets in major US cities – essentially a virtual tour of metropolitan areas for people who are halfway down life’s sad journey to Second Life avatar loserdom.

I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me wonders what the big deal is? It’s not like Google is kicking in your door and filming you on the toilet, they are rolling a van with cameras down a public street. Anyone can, and some people probably do, the same thing.

So Google posts an image one time and catches you doing something stupid? Grow a spine. Learn to laugh at yourself. If you can’t handle people seeing you do something stupid, then don’t dig the wedgie out of your ass in public. Who the hell sits around all day anyway looking at Google Street View to find this stuff? Nerds - that’s who.

“Huhh huh … I saw a half a boob through a dark window.” Congratulations loser, you’re a virtual peeping-tom, get off the computer and go hang out with your friends – oh wait, you don’t have any that aren’t imaginary.

Street View is good for one thing – looking at someplace I might actually go to make sure I know it when I see it. It’s just like Google Earth, Google Maps or anything else. It’s amazing for about 10 minutes, and then I get the hang of it and figure out that I’m staring at the electronic version of a hammer – it’s a tool, morons. The normal use for something like this takes fifteen seconds, max. Spend anymore time on this thing, and you may as well buy your avatar some fresh clothes and head to the dork convention.

Some cities actually have live cameras that record what is going on and can show a feed over the internet now anyway, but no-one is in an uproar over the government’s intrusion on your life EVERY DAY. Traffic cameras that the government posts allow you to be monitored all over a city every single day in near real time.

At least you could theoretically put Google out of business. But you can’t get rid of the government, and what they’re doing is the equivalent of taking your tax money right out of your pocket and leaving their hand in there to fondle you for the rest of your life.

This idea excites the other part of me – the privacy centered outrage in me over the whole thing. I realize how much I hate when the government monitors me, and I’ll be damned if Google does it too. I fantasize about mooning the van, or taking a big deuce on my lawn as the van rolls past just to stick it to them and make them look like idiots.

I’ll bet if more of this went on, Google would be shamed into figuring out how to do something a lot better than face blurring.

But I think the happy middle ground in this situation is to recognize what this could be good for. I fully support Google Street View, provided that they drive and film all of the roads in each city during rush hour and document the absolute abuse commuters put up with.

To heighten the realism, Google should fix it so that you cannot advance down the Street View faster than the prevailing speed of traffic during the time the pictures were taken. While you enjoy your “virtual commute” to advance a few inches through the Street View, helpful links should be provided to the local departments of transportation, the federal DoT, the Congressmen and Senators from the district/state in question, the president, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (interstates were designed for national defense after all, and annoying people outside the special circle of transportation idiocy might stimulate some inter-departmental harassment within the government to do something about this problem). The quasi-avatar nerds who spend a lot of time looking at things like Street Scene could even get imaginarily outraged and use some imaginary money to buy an imaginary flying car (and hopefully crash it into imaginary oblivion).

In the meantime, I’ll be busy sitting on my front steps naked shooting fireworks waiting for the van so I can zip down a slip n’ slide full of chocolate pudding for posterity. Have fun blurring that, Google.

Related Posts

• Google Employees List “Commute” As Reason to Leave Company

Recommended Reading