Street View camera rigs do much more than just take photos

Completely unsurprising that if you take a group of people, each of whom individually believe in deriving utility from things they can get with or without permission, then that collective group also behaves in the same manner.

It’s also impossible to verify what Google will do with that data now or forever. They say they’re doing it in good faith, but then again everyone says that. How can you verify that, and do you trust them with it forever?

Sure. However if that someone snaps a picture, that changes. Especially if you knew they're being paid to collect pictures for a popular website.

The outrage is over the scale and complete lack of accountability. If Google detailed the specific information that was collected and stored, positively notified every subject, and gave us all a way to easily permanently opt out, it would be a different story. But instead, these surveillance companies insist on treating OUR personal information as "their" property based simply on their having collected it. Hopefully this is starting to slowly change with the GDPR etc, although it's going to be a long path due to how thoroughly surveillance companies have embedded themselves into society.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/25/28...

> In 2001, the Supreme Court held in Kyllo v. United States that police officers violated the Fourth Amendment when they used a thermal imaging device to detect marijuana plants growing inside a home. "Where ... the government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia.

> To make his point, Scalia added that the device can tell you things that the average person would not be able to tell standing outside the house. "[F]or example, [the device can reveal] at what hour each night the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath," he wrote.

The point of the law here is exactly to prevent things which are technically possible, but socially frowned upon. A law against something that isn't possible doesn't do anything. (Should this be illegal? Maybe not! But your point seems very silly.)

If you're using your voice to communicate with your girlfriend in your own apartment, can you be upset if somebody's got their ear pressed up against your door, listening in? I mean, you knew that was technically possible to do. Why would you expect privacy?

That's not accurate. The expectation of privacy is a legal term related to the USA. There's quite a difference in privacy you'd expect. E.g., just because you could see someone doesn't mean it's ok to hang a camera pointing to that place and record everything that's going on. Similarly, I do expect to have privacy in public places. It's weird not to expect that. Cameras have a big privacy impact, just because you could have a security person there doesn't mean that a camera is the same thing.

> I may not like it, but doing it from a public area is perfectly legal

If enough people do not like it the law should be adjusted. Too often the argument is that something is legal. This while people are changing and introducing new laws on a daily basis.

Seeing someone parked out the front of your house with a sensor array aimed at you isn't going to get you hot under the collar?

You don't reckon you'd suddenly find yourself motivated to work out what you can do about it?

You say that now.

Thought experiment: Can I grab your address?

Remember, you don't know me and you don't know my intent.

Full disclosure: I have a violent criminal record.

Still comfortable?

""" In a discussion of 'Privacy Considerations,' the design document states, 'A typical concern might be that we are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.' That statement plainly refers to the collection of payload data because MAC addresses, SSIDs, signal-strength measurements. and other information used to map the location of wireless access points would reveal nothing about what end users 'were doing.'" """

I disagree with that assessment. If you're a Google engineer writing the privacy section of the design doc, you're encouraged to blue sky possible abuse scenarios, even unlikely ones. That quote, to me, reads not as admission that packet capture was part of the design, but that SSID, MAC address, and signal strength measurement alone could be enough to make ballpark guesses on what a user was doing (MAC addresses, for example, are issued to specific device vendors, so knowing my MAC address is chatting to my wifi, and no other information, could be used to make an educated guess as to whether I'm watching TV if you see heavy traffic between my wifi and a device advertising a MAC address that tends to show up in a Samsung smart TV product line). I think the FCC investigator lacked imagination here. ;)

You'll note what the quote omits, which is any section of the design document that says something like "Full data packets will be captured and stored for future analysis." That's a glaring omission if full-packet data capture were part of the actual design, and the quote appears to be an FCC investigator attempting to read between the lines.

One can make the argument that the easiest way to maintain privacy is to not do anything; if you never collate data, nobody's privacy ever needs to be considered. That's the entropy answer; true and boring. If you never have an app, you don't have to care about security. If you never write software, you never have bugs.

Discarding that null set of privacy scenarios, I observe Google's mistakes are far outstripped by the features and successfully-architected products and I can't think of anyone with a similar ratio of successes to mistakes.

For example, it can be used to estimate wealth at a distance. This means, for example, if I'm trying to make any kind of transaction, someone can look at my house and cars and make the price vary with their perception of my wealth. This is a form of prejudice.

It can also be used to look up interviewees. It can be used to give them the lowest possible salary based on where they live and what their perceived life circumstances are like. It's already been demonstrated that resumes with ethnic names are taken less seriously.

And what's more, this power can't be checked. Since google has a monopoly, no one else can challenge it. If it's used e.g. in a court case, no one can oppose it, because their is no corroborating or countering imagery.

And what's more, the way this information is consumed has asymmetry. For example, yes, while any individual can zip around google maps and learn information, wealthy individuals and corporations can access large amounts of public information and process it, turning it again into private information. This private information can then be used to enhance wealth, e.g. by estimating areas to develop real estate, mine resources, etc., in a way that individuals simply can not.

This all means that while individuals retain the power to observe their immediate surroundings, powerful groups, including foreign nations, are able to exert a power several orders of magnitude larger. They are in effect exploiting our individual right to observe and turning it against us.