p2pnet news view Advertising | P2P:- When you’re a 1,000-pound online advertising gorilla with limitless financial resources and obscene political clout, you can pretty well do what you want.

Or you think you can.

And that includes ignoring polite requests,  initially, and then demands, to cease and desist not only from ordinary people, but also from entire nations.

Google, or the Great Satan of Mountain View, as Britain’s The Register calls it, touts its Street View surfer advertising hook as a ’service’.

Gargle SnoopMobiles with panoramic cameras mounted on the top tour the streets of the world taking pictures of houses and scenes without bothering to ask if that’s okay with the owners, or the people in them.

In the process, they often get snaps of faces, licence plates on cars, and all kinds of other information and material which should be totally private.

These Gargoyle Snoop-O-Rama pictures are then published millions of times around the world  for everyone with an online account to see.

The company claims its obfuscation techniques effectively prevent most EIEs (embarrassing identification events).

But surely ‘all’ is the only acceptable criterion.

Failure to live up to its claims

Switzerland recently joined the throng of complainants.

It said, and still says, Gargle’s pictures violate privacy laws, “by failing to obscure people’s identities”.

Google promised to sort things but, “Switzerland’s head of federal data protection has told Google that his country is still not sufficiently blurry on the Great Satan of Mountain View’s Street View service, despite the company agreeing to further obscure faces and number plates,” said The Register, publishing Street View pictures of clearly identifiable vehicle licence plates.

Nowhere is anonymity more highly prized or religiously guarded than in Switzerland, home to the world’s most secretive institutions.

But ironically, there are few places where examples of Google’s failure to live up to its claims of identity protection are more glaringly obvious.

In our post on the Swiss story, we  ran a picture of an elderly gentleman lifted from a Street Vew scene in Berne.

Shouldn’t be too tough to identify him, we thought.

Then frequent p2pnet poster Marc  decided to look a little further and  while he was surfing, he came across site listing Swiss abortion clinics whose clients include teens aged 16 and under.

Any chance of these showing up on Google? – he wondered.

But of course.

This is, after all, Google Street View.

And no matter which side of the abortion fence you happen to be sitting, the last thing you want is to have your face or vehicle licence number splashed across the World Wide Web.

Below is a montage of 32 miniaturised pix clipped from Google Street View and even at these very considerably reduced sizes, some of the people might still be recognizable.

But full size, even though some of the faces are blurred, they’d still easily be recognizable to anyone who knew them. And there’d be no trouble at all with the licence plates or locations.

To be safe, we’ve done Google’s job for it,obscuring the faces in red.

You’re welcome, Gargle.

But Marc didn’t stop there, finding scores of other easily recognizable Google images showing faces car and motorcycle licence plates, locations, and so on.

And this was only Switzerland.

Stay tuned.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

most recent privacy invasion – Google Street View vs Switzerland, September 18, 2009
recently joined the throng - No Street View! Switzerland tells Google,   August 25, 2009
The Register – Street View stalks Swiss data protection bureau, September 17, 2009

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Advertising, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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