June 27, 2007

Who defines our privacy rights? Old laws, google, or you?

Posted by Larisa Mann at 12:22AM

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On May 29th, Google revealed their latest development: Street View. In California, Google contractor Immersive Media drove vans with 360-degree-range cameras on their roofs, through city streets generating panoramic, zoomable, street-level pictures. Google says: "users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans"

Google's press release only highlight's the technology's positive attributes. But some users may choose less-than-savory uses for the service; some already have: zooming into car windows to catch women bending over, or focusing on sunbathers, or couples making out on park benches.

Already, some folks find this development creepy.

Some of these concerns may seem remote since the public sites aren't constantly filmed, and the images are only refreshed once in a while. But filming will become cheaper and more ubiquitous (since information is valuable), we need to set guidelines now, and be assertive about our privacy rights.

Imagine if your parents, teachers, bosses -- those with the power to judge or punish -- were to take your presence at a certain location out of context, and then interrogate those moments caught on camera -- at the free healthcare clinic, the LGBT youth center, or Good Vibrations?

Also, people have reason to feel vulnerable in public spaces already, especially those targeted because of their appearance or some visible aspect of their identity. If a public space becomes exponentially more public -- because millions of people can view it remotely-- easily identifiable citizens are especially at risk. They have rights too!

In fact, Google already concedes there are standards to be respected by not filming battered women's shelters. In recognizing that there are some cases where privacy trumps photography, Google opens the door to a public discussion of who gets to decide what is OK or not to capture on film. It was right for Google to exempt women's shelters. But why is it alright to film any individual citizen? Who gets to decide who deserves privacy rights? Why is Google (or technology design itself) the arbiter of what we deserve when it comes to privacy?

Those folks who say "don't worry" make several flimsy arguements that miss the point:

"People can see you all the time when you are out in public" Direct, focused attention through a window or directly in front of a sunbather would get a real person a smack, or at least a "bug off, creep". When someone stares at you, most of the time you can see them too. Also, they are not storing your image for a length of time, nor are they making it available to millions of people remotely.

"Taking pictures in public (noncommercially) is legal now" Generally true, although zooming into people's windows is illegal in some states. However, the laws were written when you could observe someone photograph you, and the images were not in networked, searchable databases. (Flickr, as such a database should raise some similar concerns.)

Our privacy laws arose before all this was possible, and before commercially available small high-quality cameras. For example, until the law was changed in the late 1990s, courts found that using hidden cameras to take pictures up women's skirts violated no privacy right, because laws were written before it was possible to do such a thing. This should be a lesson in not relying on law to define our rights!

Our privacy rights are incoherent, vary state-by-state, and (in public spaces) depend on whether you have an expectation of privacy. This is weirdly circular -- the more we learn about new invasions, the less privacy we expect, which dooms us to living in a fishbowl as technology changes, unless we move now to redefine our rights in a more positive way.

Oddly, many of the same people who are sure that the law is inadequate, outdated and needs to be changed when it comes to copyright also argue that privacy law is adequate as is. The public needs to assert its right to be free from surveillance because technology frequently outpaces law.

Google has responded to concerns raised by folks like Kevin Bankston at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, by making its image-takedown procedures simpler. But after-the-fact privacy is not enough. Instead, Google could:

• Have the filming van announce its presence -- perhaps playing a cheery jingle like an ice cream truck. This would warn people of impending photographs.
• Have less zoom or use facial-recognition technology to blur faces (or something!)
• Allow an in-advance opt-out policy for houses, streets, workplaces. (this, by the way, rolls back our concept of 'expectation of privacy' which means people don't know to opt out would lose any rights they might have.)
• Allow an opt-in policy for places that want to be included.

The main problem now is, despite its statements about privacy, Google designs its technologies to collect information first, make it public second, and consider our needs for privacy a distant third. Those priorities are not inherent in a design process, they are built into them by the designers, who could be required to design differently. This is important to speak up about, because while those priorities work for Google, they may not work for all of us.