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Google is Big Brother Spy
New Google Feature
Culled from Netscape.com
06-18-2007
If you live in or visit San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami or Silicon Valley in northern California, beware. Photographs of you minding your daily business could very well be on Google Maps and Earth--and some of them may be downright unflattering and even embarrassing if you're caught in a compromising position.
Find out the safest search engine you can use. (Read to the end of the story for the answer.)
It's called the "Street View" feature. Agence France Presse reports that last week Google added street-scene photographs to its Google Maps and Earth in a kind of high-tech candid camera.
Using special vans, photos are randomly shot of passersby, but some people are portrayed in delicate situations, such as a woman climbing into a car while her pants ride down so low her thong underwear is clearly visible.
Privacy advocates are up in arms, warning Google not to break its own "Don't Be Evil" code of conduct.
WHO is reading your e-mail? Find out how little e-mail privacy you have at work.
Google promotes the feature on its Web site, saying, "With Street View 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."
Yeah, and they can check out the men who are urinating on the street, the young women in skimpy bikinis sunbathing near Stanford University, a man climbing a home's security gate and people going into a pornography shop. (Hey, guys, try to deny that one when the wife catches you in Street View.)
There is a photo of a couple embracing on the sidewalk and another shot of a couple getting quite intimate on a bus stop bench, notes AFP. Sadly, a homeless man is pictured sitting with his dog on a street corner; the man has reportedly died since the photo was shot. Protesters are shown outside a Miami abortion clinic.
Lest you think this is illegal, it's not. It's perfectly lawful in the United States to take photographs of people in public places. "What Google does is not illegal, but irresponsible," Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told AFP. "Google Street View technology has been an intrusion of privacy to many people captured in their pictures.
They could have waited until they developed technology that would allow them to obscure peoples' faces." Google did acknowledge that it is working with shelters for battered women and children to avoid photographs endangering their visitors and insists it only uses photographs that are taken on public property.
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