"There is no such thing as bad publicity" goes the old
adage, but sometimes casting the glare of publicity on non-issues
can obscure real and pressing issues from public view. So it is
with Senator Charles Schumer's (D-NY) comments
yesterday over the threat to privacy posed by online mapping
technologies such as Google Maps, Microsoft's Bing Maps,
and Apple's forthcoming iOS Maps. "Sunbathing in your
backyard shouldn't be a public event" said Schumer in a press release which raised the specter of
Google, Microsoft, and Apple using "military-grade
technology" to capture aerial photos for their next-generation
mapping services.
The problem with Sen. Schumer's remarks, as with the ongoing
furor over Google Street View, is that they focus an inordinate
amount of media and public attention on what in the scheme of
things is a very minor threat to privacy. It is true that in the
early days of Google Street View, some individuals were the subject
of unwelcome attention when they were photographed in places they
would rather not be seen in public. But not only has this problem
been solved by Google's practice of blurring faces and license
plates, but the only information that was revealed about a
person in the pre-blurring days was that the person was present at
a specific location at the time the Google Street View car drove
by. What is more, any person incidentally photographed by Google
remained anonymous until someone who knew them happened to spot
them in Street View, or the photograph went viral for some reason.
Consider, by contrast, the threat to privacy posed by the vast
surveillance networks that are designed to track every
aspect of our online and off-line lives. Most people do not even
know that it is even possible for
advertisers to track every website they visit online, or for
retailers to determine our wealth, political persuasion, or
pregnancy status from the products we buy. Earlier this week,
the New York Times ran an excellent piece on how
companies like Acxiom are combining both streams of data in
order to paint exquisitely detailed pictures about every aspect of
our lives. These technologies pose the real threat to privacy in
our online age, but they do not get the attention they deserve
because of the continuing media and political fixation on the
remote possibility that you might be incidentally photographed by a
technology that has specifically been designed to blur out your
face from such pictures!
The cause of improving online and offline privacy protections
would be better served by individuals like Sen. Schumer using their
considerable influence to highlight new and emerging privacy
threats, rather than conjuring the ghosts of privacy problems
past.
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