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Saturday, August 09, 2008

Google as Big Brother

Say the government planned to drive through our neighbourhoods and take pictures of our houses and our stuff and integrate it with a GIS and real time capability to use it?

We would protest. Invasion of privacy, surveillance society, tut tut...

Say a large private company did the same thing without asking for permission and made it available to anybody with internet access.

We would say cool, neat, useful, interesting.....

Our house was done when we were preparing for our hard rubbish collection. It does not look its best.
Zemanta Pixie

5 comments:

Jayne said...

I was most incensed to see my house online - before we'd weeded the front garden!
They could have let us know so we could have tidied up beforehand lol.

River said...

I quite enjoyed having a look at most of the houses we'd previously lived in and seeing what the current owners/tenants have done with the gardens. And having a "real" look at some of the real estate on sale is better than viewing a "cleaned up" photo taken by the selling agency, plus you can see a bit of the surrounding neighbourhood, maybe that could be a deciding factor in whether or not to actually attend an open inspection.

Anonymous said...

That's source credibility for you - but it also applies against companies. Science from activists is seen as good, from government or big business is viewed with cynicism.

Sean Jeating said...

Who are the two good looking persons behind the fence? :)

Seriously, most people seemingly don't (want) to see possible negative consequences of these efforts.
And most of those who do would remain passive, 'knowing' they could not stop the 'progress', anyway.

SouthOzBloke said...

I attended a conference last Friday and one of the speakers was talking about the numerous court cases Google America is involved in regarding Street View.
Most of them come from Civil Liberties groups obviously concerned with the aforementioned Civil Liberties and the other legal cases are from rich and powerful people who are now upset anyone can have a decent look around the outside of their house without leaving their lounge.
Another mob using it is the "name and shame brigade" who are giving out the addresses/links of paedophiles, cheating partners and/or anyone else they want to "out".
Having said all that, I checked my house out too and it's really cool.