How do you feel about google maps showing your assets online?

Google Street View, released in the U.S. in 2007, is currently the subject of an ongoing debate about possible infringement on individual privacy. In an article entitled “Privacy, Reconsidered: New Representations, Data Practices, and the Geoweb”, Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski (2011) argue that Google Street View “facilitate[s] identification and disclosure with more immediacy and less abstraction.” The medium through which Street View disseminates information, the photograph, is very immediate in the sense that it can potentially provide direct information and evidence about a person’s whereabouts, activities, and private property. Moreover, the technology’s disclosure of information about a person is less abstract in the sense that, if photographed, a person is represented on Street View in a virtual replication of his or her own real-life appearance. In other words, the technology removes abstractions of a person’s appearance or that of his or her personal belongings – there is an immediate disclosure of the person and object, as they visually exist in real life. Although Street View began to blur license plates and people’s faces in 2008, the technology is faulty and does not entirely ensure against accidental disclosure of identity and private property.