Non-Profit Tech Blog

A news channel has reported that a slain homeless man, Cornelius Van Der Vies, was sighted living on virtually in Google Street View. Google’s Street View has unintentionally invented a new kind of public discourse about our surroundings. We now have the ability to see our streets on the Web and as a result of that, never has the social impact of our government’s policies been so easily viewable. The question behind today’s blog entry is: “What does it mean to Google users when the street they wish to view also includes people of the street?”

There are several technologies at work at the same time in the picture above, the discourse of imagery and viewing and our resulting lack of comfort over not having any control or consent over the imagery that is taken because it’s in our public sphere. There is the Web and it’s ability to multiply and rapidly disseminate the image once it’s taken. And then there are the shadowy technologies of social command and control that we employ to carry out our social policies, such as zoning, signage, and the architecture surrounding an office building.

Google hires vans to move across our city landscape in order to capture street imagery and even the very word we use for imaging is reminiscent of war. It’s a different kind of digital divide this time with Google’s vans on one side and us Google Street Viewers on the other. We’re both watching and simultaneously watched with the powerless among us not even knowing about the activity of watching or not able to access it.

It’s a typical tableau you see in the city. You can see two couples on the left and right looking in the direction of Mr. Van Der Vies. There’s a man standing in the very foreground on the corner. There’s an additional figure sitting further back from Mr. Van Der Vies. If you swivel around in the picture, you’ll see additional pedestrians and cars. The picture of Mr. Van der Vies as presented in the news report and above is rather unusual for Google Street View. It’s entirely zoomed into a view of him. However, Google normally presents it completely zoomed out and unless you knew he was there you probably would have glanced over it. There’s a strong possibility that he was being searched for specifically.

It’s a real-world version of SimCity that Google presents to us but without the discursive framework of a video game wrapped around it. In video games, the “non-playable” discourse and the “undesirable” discourse tend to be wrapped up with one another. SimCity almost always reduced issues of poverty to a visual rendition of a building as being more grimy and graffiti-ridden. You can’t do that with Google Street View. It doesn’t grey out the “undesirable”. And of course, Cornelius Van Der Vies was never a sim.

However, this is just a side effect of Google Street View, at least in Google’s view. The intent as it was presented at the recent Where 2.0 conference was to give people better directions and more clarity as to how the street looked once you got there. It was never intended as civic commentary on the street. It was an engineer’s view of the world through a glass lens brightly with details pared away such as bad weather and awkward transitions between photographs.

I had a brief conversation about privacy concerns even before this with Michael Brown, Google Earth’s CTO in the parking lot of the Fairmont Hotel. For myself, I don’t think you can achieve any privacy whatsoever out in public. Mr. Brown told me that the two year timeline on the project itself actually depended somewhat on Google working out privacy issues beforehand with public advocates. In essence, Google is trying to provide people with a kind of retroactive privacy. You can, if you are unhappy with Google’s coverage of say, you sunbathing nude in your backyard, request that a photograph be stricken from Google’s copious 100 terabyte record. And for Google Street View, you have several options available to you:

But who will stand in for the powerless? Indeed, what about Mr. Van Der Vies? Will people ask for his record to be stricken in the interest of his perceived privacy? Is privacy achievable for homeless people who are almost always in the public eye? How can it be that we believe in privacy for all yet the condition that safeguards it, housing, is not guaranteed? Isn’t that the real issue behind the newsworthiness of this item?