While walking to the grocery store, I caught the Google Street View car (there’s only one, right?) racing through my neighbourhood in North Toronto. Here you can see it turning south onto Doon Road off Beechwood with the camera mounted on its roof. The drivers must have quotas because this one was in a hurry! He was doing between 60 & 70 km/h on a residential street (max is 50 km/h). I only had time to take it with my cheezy cell phone camera. If I had more time, I would have unbuckled my shorts and mooned it as I had in a post last year. According to the National Post, Google could be rolling out the Toronto installment of Street View soon.
I fail to understand why we allow this. You may wonder how a blogger who posts photos of his own butt on the internets could possibly raise privacy concerns in relation to Google Street View. Well, I can. And I do. The fact that I deliberately compromise my privacy is a separate issue from whether I have either the right or the capacity to preserve my privacy in the first instance. I suppose that baring my butt is my way of saying: “If I have no choice in the matter, then at least this violation of my privacy is going to happen on MY terms.”
In a free and democratic society, privacy has traditionally been treated as a limited right on a tightrope between personal freedom and social necessity. For example, police can’t arbitrarily demand that I produce proof of my identity. But sometimes the common good requires that police be given some discretion. So if the police have a reasonable belief that I have just committed a criminal offence, then, to facilitate an effective investigation, they can make some incursions into my personal affairs. It’s a question of balance.
The question which still addles my brain is: how did a private corporation ever get to participate in this balancing act? Why are we so complacent? Why is each of us willing to give up so much of what is supposed to be one of our fundamental freedoms?
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Wed, May 20, 2009
Half-filtered