I wasn't going to draw attention to this article, but I saw it a few seconds after it was published and had the the benefit of seeing only the first dozen or so comments made in response, and was heartened to see that they were in fact largely polite versions of my own opinion of what Henry Porter had written, and which had driven me to the conclusion that he was some sort of idiot, and was a paid up-member of the Google-bashing party.
I've seldom read so much tripe in one article, so I thought it was worthy of being shared.
I'm not going to make any comments, the first few who commented on the original article have so more eloquently and less insultingly to Henry Porter than I could. However, he strikes me as an old man with old man's views, and no intention of moving them forward into the 21st century and understanding that the established models of the past have to move forward with the likes of Google, YouTube, Scribd and the like, or things will just progress as more of the same, instead of evolving into something new:
"The article is so relevant. Google is getting like Fred Goodwin."
Seeing this last week I thought this was a novel new toy but on hindsight I have done a U-Turn.
Like me it would seem quite a lot of people think google are getting pretty arrogant (like Fred Goodwin) and certain parts of the populace (the folk in that leafy village in England a few days ago who stopped the camera car) are none too happy with their houses being photographed, legal or not people should not have to request a foreign company that detailed images of their property be removed from a world wide audience of voyeurs.
Quote the google spokesman;
"We take the photos from the public road and that is legal"
Now can you imagine how you would get on if you walked along a street and took a photograph (or two or three) of each house? Do you think if the cops arrived they would take heed of your assertion that "I am taking the photos from a public road and that is legal"
Actually, I've woken up with a better idea, especially since I already dismissed the Thugs of Broughton days ago in the Blog,
And it's a question in two parts...
Freely available photographs are published on the web by Google, but could as easily and freely be published on Flickr, and in real high resolution, not the fuzzy rubbish seen in Street View. These can be geotagged and found by location, and that reminds us of the Geograph project, where every grid square will be freely photographed and published on the web, also able to be found by location, and also proper digital photographs, rather than fuzzy, web-optimised views.
These, and others have been around a lot longer than Google Street View, have photographs taken and posted there by ordinary people, and there is no tool for having a house, car registration number or picture of yourself removed.
Google-bashing case proven, or not?
This country is the CCTV/surveillance capital of Europe, maybe the world, with at their last news story, 4,200,000 CCTV cameras pointing at us.
Yet although the good people of Broughton, and the rest of us, are unlikely to be able to determine if we, our homes, or our faces are recorded by them, we are largely unable to identify or control who looks at those images, use those images, or whether or not they retain those images for future use. And how does so much of it come to appear on TV, providing hours of fun footage? Those who have it don't even keep it private.
So, Google is attacked for acting openly and in public.
Flickr, Geograph, and the other picture hosting services who also have geo-tagging and similar, are ignored, even though they have millions of better pics than Street View - and NO option for having a pic you don't like removed.
And as for CCTV, everyone just swallows the line that it works, and could do little about what it captures of them anyway.
It seems if I complain about being photographed by faceless people over whom I have no control, I am dismissed because I should have nothing to fear if I have nothing to hide.
Yet when a publicly visible body openly takes photographs as it is entitled to do, AND gives people the option to control those photographs, its fine for them to have something to hide - even though they selectively pick one target for their concern, and ignore all others.
Or would I be chased out of Broughton by a mob if I took my camera out of my pocket, or pinned against a wall and questioned by some concerned citizens?
Looking at the news feeds today, it was interesting to see two items reported separately. but which landed on my "desk" together.
In the first. there was coverage of the great fall of the newspaper, particularly in America - fair enough, it's by far the largest single market when any trend will be noted.
In the second, there was yet another Anti-Google drivel stream, this time, surprise surprise, by the newspaper barons, tycoons, or whatever you want to call them, against the Google concept that content should be free, as it is whenever you get your hands on something Google provides.
If the robber barons have their way, you'll never read a piece of news, or get some information off the web without paying them first...
For example, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch told a conference: "People reading news for free on the web, that's got to change."
Robert Thomson, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and former editor of The Times said companies that aggregate mainstream media content without paying a fee are the "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet".
I just think they see their massive fortunes getting a dent, and instead of changing their business model to suit, and competing with Google, they want sit on their fat backsides and bank accounts and have the competition eliminated at no cost to them.
The music industry eventually realised it should use the medium it used to claim was killing it.
With any luck, the press barons might roll over and die before realisation dawns - and the rest of us can move forward.
It's nice when someone saves you having to reinvent the wheel, and that not everyone in the media is out to make a self-righteous name for themselves by joining the Google-bashing community - at least not in whole, as you see if you have a look at this article by Michael Cross.
And no, I don't know him from Adam, I quote his name only to make him clearly distinguishable from Henry Porter, the wally I didn't insult at the start of the thread
Cross at least gets the idea of striking a balance, and not just reacting with a knee-jerk.
There's little wonder any Google camera car driver wouldn't make a similar protest after the Thugs of Broughton have apparently escaped free after terrorising one driver and barring their access to the Public Highway.
And as of a few weeks ago, the police and services now have the Terrorism Act to fall back on if you point a camera at them and they don't like it, but you have to let them record you with no say in the matter.
The sooner Microsoft gets its competing product into the public domain the better, so these people have more than one target to focus on.
I sympathise with the driver as (and I'm not giving details for hopefully obvious reasons) but I had to take ages this evening when attempting to take some photographs in the street in Tollcross this evening, just to avoid attracting attention in the light of recent publicity.
I normally avoid having people in my shots simply because I don't want them to detract from the subject, but now find I am deliberately arranging times to avoid people being around. Although it was outside school hours, I nearly jumped out my skin when taking some photographs of school furniture the other day, as I caught sight of some primary school kids who must have been on after-school activities, and a guy came up behind me from nowhere as I was concentrating on the shots.
the Thugs of Broughton have apparently escaped free after terrorising one driver and barring their access to the Public Highway.
The sooner Microsoft gets its competing product into the public domain the better, so these people have more than one target to focus on.
The thugs of Broughton? Did they break any law? Surely they were preventing a suspicious looking car with cameras from photographing their street ? Neighbourhood Watch and all that. Crime prevention is better than reporting crime.
And after Microsoft maybe it will be okay for them and google to increase the resolution of their aerial pics enough to see your washing hanging oot .............. and then a wee while later unblot faces and car number plates.
Probably wise. My only knowlege of Linux comes from reading a few computer magazines several years ago. Their advice was also not to bother unless you knew computing inside out.
The Captain's propaganda pic/advert seems to have been created by someone who is clearly deranged.
If the idly wondering man is dead now, then all those cameras obviously didn't do anything to protect him.
The ad doesn't say if the killers were caught, or even identified, or even seen by the cameras.
"Stamp out Thoughtcrime".
What on earth does that mean?
Thoughtcrime comes from 1984 and was committed by the citizen when merely thinking about something that was not in to Big Brother's liking.
Those committing Thoughtcrime were likely to have their doors kicked in during the night, and be carried away for treatment at the appropriate Ministry establishment.
Is merely thinking "are these cameras really protecting my liberty, or infringing it" Thoughtcrime in the eyes of the government?
Did the man die for thinking this and committing a Thoughtcrime?
As an aside, the old Confidential Anti-Terror Hotline isn't likely to be very confidential since all calls are now to be logged with regard to their date, time and location, if not content, and this can be tied to the surveillance camera footage, also logged, and which can then be tied to whatever report was recorded by whoever takes the call.
In other words, there is enough surveillance information to allow the caller to be identified, just match the time of the call to the video record from the various cameras around whatever phone was used. What they reported to the Hotline can then be tied to them, and if deemed dangerous, they can be picked up - all as a result of their "Confidential" call.
The thugs of Broughton? Did they break any law? Surely they were preventing a suspicious looking car with cameras from photographing their street ? Neighbourhood Watch and all that. Crime prevention is better than reporting crime.
The Thugs of Broughton (in my opinion) committed an assault by barring the access of someone on the public highway, and behaving in a manner that forced that person to leave the area.
For information, assault is the threat, if an attack is carried out after the threat, than that is assault and battery.
Forget the Google aspect, which is not relevant since the driver was merely driving along the road with the equipment on the car, the thugs had no way of knowing if it was active or not, and could not determine this before they stopped the car. If you had been driving along the same road, and had been met by the same mob, and made to leave, would you still be asking if they broke any law?
What makes a car with cameras driving along a road in broad daylight suspicious? Was it hiding behind trees, or was the driver wearing a mask? There is no crime in legally driving along a road. There is no crime in photographing a street. End of story. If the driver was driving and holding a camera and taking photographs at the same time, then that be different, but if you're going to to call out the Neighbourhood Watch for a Google camera car, what of TV, news, and film crews? What crime - of relevance to the remit of the self appointed vigilantes of a Neighbourhood Watch - is a highly visible and noticeable car driving openly along a public road in broad daylight likely to be involved in? And what of the new police cars with the high resolution cameras on telescopic masts? These can take proper pics from a distance, can zoom in, and would have no problem in looking in windows - as would most of the TV cameras. And this something that the Google Street View cameras simply can't do as the cars drive along the road.
And after Microsoft maybe it will be okay for them and google to increase the resolution of their aerial pics enough to see your washing hanging oot .............. and then a wee while later unblot faces and car number plates.
Sorry, but what is the point of this? Aerial pics are overhead shots taken from aircraft (or satellite for the low resolution pics), and the resolution is already enough to show washing, cars, and even people, but not faces or registration plates due to the vertical aspect of the view.
The blurring of faces and registration plates is part of images taken at ground level and shown in Street View, not the aerial views, and forms part of the operating procedure that means the system can function with the blessing of the Information Commissioner. This is clear from the detailed wording of his ruling on the acceptability of Street View. Removing it arbitrarily has not been suggested, and would lead to problems because its existence and use is specifically included in the ICO ruling made in response to the challenge brought by Privacy International.
I chanced across some info about Microsoft's upcoming version of Street view, and it seems to be quite different from the Google item.
There is no set schedule or program to be followed to cover any specific area, and they will not be sending out any sort of photographic teams.
Instead, they will be looking for contributed pictures and reportedly have an image processing system - Photosynth - that will knit together the contributed images to provide the final street level view.
There's a working preview here, which does a couple of American city centres as examples of how the system will work.
Intriguing if a bit gimicky. I found myself on the wrong side of the road which is a bit alarming. Still, the east end of Glasgow will be a sinch if they get in touch with Apollo.
I can't quite work out their logic for banning the Google photo-cars.
Athens's data protection agency has prohibited vehicles manned by Google's Street View drivers from the country.
The all-powerful watchdog said the search engine would have to provide "additional information" and concrete guarantees that the service was not an invasion of personal privacy before expanding the program to Greece.
"We are not going to allow our country to become a Big Brother society," said one agency official, who asked not to be named.
PARDON??? A public official stating their country is not going ot become a Big Brother society and refusing to be identified. Isn't that a contradiction?
Whatever happened to the old "If you've nothing to hide..." argument?
In part a legacy of seven years of harsh military rule, Greece has draconian rules around protecting private data – edicts that for years have made it extremely hard for governments to install state-of-the-art monitoring technologies. The abolition of CCTV cameras, although a relative rarity in Greece compared with the UK and other EU states, was a major demand of protesters when violence erupted in the country last December.
Asked whether the clampdown on Google Street View was an extreme measure – given that it is legal to take photographs in public places across Greece – another watchdog official said "photographs are not normally made available globally and therefore there is no risk of violation of personal data".
That seems to be a bit of "selective policy" as most tourists that take pics while in holiday in Greece are slapping them into things like Flickr and Picasa (and dozens of other photo hosting services), so millions of pics of Greece, and Greek citizens, are being circulated globally on the internet.
The Greek agency also prohibited a rival surveillance service operated by ISP Kapou, a Greek company, saying its images posed a similar threat.
Echoing a widespread view, Yannis Papadopoulos, a Greek leftist who agreed with the watchdog's precautionary stance said: "Privacy as a concept or even word may not exist in our language but all this snooping is simply Orwellian. We won't let it pass."
Snooping? Photos taken at random of street views? What does Yannis Papadopoulos thing is being snooped on? Is he perhaps worried that old Greek militarist officials might be spotted doing something iffy - like arresting plane spotters
Sounds like a country where Big Brother is already well in place, where the state can do as it wishes, but if the public try and do something in public, they will end up banned, arrested, in jail, or branded as spies.
Greece has stopped Google from adding further photographs from the country to its Street View application, which provides 360-degree street level imagery, because of its concerns over privacy.
The Hellenic Data Protection Authority has imposed the suspension pending "additional information". It has asked Google how long the images taken will be retained and what steps the company is taking to protect the rights of people caught on camera, including highlighting when they are being photographed by its fleet of cars.
"Simply marking the car is not considered an adequate form of notification," the authority said. "The authority has reserved judgment on the legality of the service pending the submission of additional information, and until that time will not allow [Google] to start gathering photographs."
The authority has suspended a similar mapping service, covering Athens, Salonika and Larissa, run by the Greek internet service provider Kapou.
(Oooooh dear, oh dear).
At least the haven't lined the streets with Greek troops yet, with orders to open fire on any Google camera cars - yet.
Greece will be like Britain soon, where the police force tourist delete pics from their cameras if they don't like them.
The eternal neuts, ex. watch makers, chocolatiers, child kidnappers and utter bankers - the sinister Swiss have decided to declare war on somebody - not a country mind ye ................ it took them long enough. How many tanks do google have?
I object! My thread is far more anti-Swiss than (at least in this case) anti-Google.
Google - to their credit - have never yet kidnapped Gypsy children and had them adopted without consent of either the child and their parents. I'd say that was progress and not anti as the admin/censor in chief has alleged by moving my thread into this hole.
If it really was a genuinely anti-Swiss post/thread, then it would be judged racist and be deleted. It was interpreted as a light-hearted play on a few words.
The Jenisch can be introduced elsewhere as a general discussion item without attacking the whole Swiss nation, and can be discussed in the same way as potentially similar Nazi concepts have been freely discussed, without prejudice.
This thread already covers the topic of action against Google and Street View, and is the appropriate place to mention a BBC article which begins, "Web search giant Google faces a court case in Switzerland because of privacy concerns over its Street View service.
It isn't racist to dislike a country who nobody has ever known the name of the prime minister - including the Swiss themselves. Its time we had a public enquiry into it. Make it an election issue, get the EU intae it.
It looks as if there will be a new cat amongst the pigeons from now on, as it seems that Bing are following Google's lead in Street View, with reports of Bing camera vans on the streets.
First reports are from Vancouver, where the Winter Olympics will be starting soon, so it would seem likely that any initial releases for public consumption would seem likely to be from there.
World War II looms - The Swiss versus Google AND Microsoft
Maybe MS will just ignore them, and drive around boredom central
Vancouver which is probably one of the world's most beautiful cities unfortunately could well qualify to be boredom central so it might have been a good place to start. Though I think the bing folk have lost their collective bings as they should simply take out a licence on the google street views (I'm sure the big G would do a deal) and brand them as their own - everybody else is doing similar things. If WW III breaks out over this I'd back the sneaky snakey swampy Swiss to win.
More joy for the anti-Google brigade, as some officials and residents of South Africa express indicate that they are less than enthusiastic, warning that in a country notorious for its high level of crime, the detailed data could be a "gift to thieves".
Haden Searles, chairman of the Durban North and Umhlanga community policing forum, told South Africa's Sunday Tribune: "This will only make the work of criminals easier. If they are going to target my house, I would want them to work much harder, not click on an image and know the security details."
Nice of Haden to give the bad guys a head start, and tell them a good place to look. I wonder what he's got that worth keeping hidden?
I only have second-hand knowledge of car crime in SA, but if it's anything to go by, then once again, the idea that photographs which are months out of date are an aid to crime is even more laughable than it is here. Even the newest Google Street View imagery is out-of date and useless for making such plans with any confidence, as CCTV and other cameras are added, moved, or removed, and streets are re-organised to suit new building works.
These supposedly concerned and worried people would do better to have HD camcorders and long focal length lenses and digital cameras outlawed, as the criminal can obtain these cheaply now, and make highly detailed, and mor importantly CURRENT images of anything they are interested, and without having to approach closely, thank to automatic image stabilisation systems built now built into both new cameras and lenses - plus low-light capabilities that were once only available to the military.
The anti-Googlies are actually diverting attention from the real dangers, and intrusions that should be paid greater attention.
But then again, somebody having a poke at Google always sells more headlines than someone suggesting a digital camera could be an aid to crime.
How many of the following problems, supposedly attributed to Google, are actually down to Google, or are they really down to the actions of those seen the in pics - taken in public places, and which could have been taken by anyone - but pointing at Google diverts attention from them?
I don't know which is the daftest, either the bloke seen with a blonde (is his marriage really that shaky he can't even be photographed on an innocent day out with his secretary?), or the Australian examples, where they identified building violations - I hope that Australian law requires them to actually visit the sites and verify that the contraventions were actually there.
As for folk complaining about being seen publicly at sex shop - still not Google's problem, is it? Anyone could have taken the pic after all.
I have to wonder at how good the resolution in the aerial images of the houses where the owners of google live - or will there have been a convenient cloud in the way that day?
There are very few clouds in Google's aerial imagery - other than those of northeast Scotland, which are only slowly being dispersed even now.
I seem to recall there are various listings of "interesting" people and the location of their homes (usually to be found published in Google Earth kml/kmz files), but I can't point you to them as they are really of no actual interest.
(UK MPs seem to remain fairly secretive, and don't hand out their home addresses, just their London office/residence, as was seen recently. Maybe they claim "clouds" on their expenses.)
Perhaps a... Goggle search would reveal them.
The Google supremos are well known, and their details are in Wikipedia. From there, being American, it should be an easy task to find their home addresses, and have a look.
Wouldn't it be embarrassing (for the knockers) if they had made use of the option to have their Street View images voluntarily removed? They could hardly claim they were exercising the option of privileged treatment, not available to J Public.
Google HQ is often used for beta testing of new features, and we get notified and shown advance examples of new features using images of the company's campus. Fairly logical since they don't have to go far to check how the things are working.
Google seems to be omniscient on this computer. It came with a Google toolbar with searchbox, the usual MS searchbox, top right, Bing? No Google again. There is another search box lower right corner of the screen - yep Google again. There is a search box behind the windows key but guess what - Google again.
The cream on the cake was getting a letter in the mail offering me Google advertising for 25p per click.
Seems you just can't please some people, no matter how philanthropic and useful (if global warming turns out to be real - just kidding! ) what you develop at fairly significant cost.
Google has developed a very impressive tool that researchers can use to track deforestation in minutes, rather than days or weeks, giving something close to real-time analysis of what is happening around the world, instead of only being able to look at the results of changes long after they have actually taken place.
And attracted this first comment by someone who clearly wanted to get the boot in...
Quoted Text
Forests are not disappearing.
It's a communist/fascist/rightwing/neocon/martian conspiracy aimed at preventing us to use garden furniture and eat cheap chicken. Google pictures are fake, like those of glaciers disappearing, the satellite images of that bunch of communists of Nasa, tovarishch Met Office measurements, etc.
Wouldn't you love to get access to the "secrets" this commentator has locked up in their head
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