I had no idea that there was a big kerfuffle in some European countries about Google Street View.
I had heard that foreigners were ignorant hill tribesmen with bones in their noses that thought cameras stole your soul, but I'd always thought those were just crazy traveller's tales.
Photography is not a crime, remember, hippies?
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Except here in the U.S. when photographing the constabulary.
ReplyDeletegfa
The crime? Contempt of cop.
I had heard that foreigners were ignorant hill tribesmen with bones in their noses that thought cameras stole your soul, but I'd always thought those were just crazy traveller's tales.
ReplyDeleteI thought that was non-coastal Americans?
As a non-coastal American, can you explain that joke to me while I get this bone out of my nose?
ReplyDeleteMuch of the kerfuffle there - poorly reported by Wikipedia in the summary, oddly - is that StreetView cars were also doing WiFi base station mapping for geolocation.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not itself a problem - but they were snaffling entire piles of packets, including "personal data" on unsecured open networks.
People who know anything about the internet don't care about that, because Jesus Christ, Open Network, What Did You Expect?, plus "Google doesn't want to steal your email password, it wants to sell you ads."
But there was a veritable tizzy about it - but mostly unrelated to the fact of street-level photography.
(Also, photography is not a crime. In the US.
Europe has only the vaguest idea of "civil rights" compared to the US.)
Maenwhile Google Glass has been banned from two bars in San Frandisco and a restaurant and a cafe in Seattle - mainly because glass-wearers seem to be uncommonly obnoxious and dangerously self-satisfied nerdalicious.
ReplyDeleteEuros: Czechs, Brits, Austrians and Germans - I bet Street-View wouldn't last a second in Calcutta or Bombay - sorry: Kolkata or Mumbai, not to mention be nearly impossible to conduct/complete.
Actually, Google streetview is already in Hyderabad, and they are working on New Delhi
ReplyDeleteSigivald's post is pretty much on the money.
ReplyDeleteThe fuss here in Britain was about logging wireless networks, which is easily countered, even post-hoc, by properly securing your wireless router. If you're really bothered by that sort of thing then you don't even broadcast your SSID. Simple.
Also, Europe really does have only the sketchiest idea of civil rights. Consider that there was such a fuss about Google hoovering up a few network SSID's but almost no discussion at all about the NSA and GCHQ monitoring basically everything. Apparently it's horrible when a private company does it, but absolutely A-ok if it's done by an organisation with ".gov.uk" in its email address.
I fold my cards...
ReplyDelete