Privacy Alerts

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The e-mail EPIC Alert comes out twice a week from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

It's a great resource for information on privacy and policy, both in 'bu$hland' and abroad.

Subscribe online here.

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The privacy implications of Street View

A new online feature of Google Maps called Street View is stirring up a debate over privacy concerns on the Web.

Google Photos Stir a Debate Over Privacy

Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.

“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”

Her husband quickly added, “It’s like peeping.”

Ms. Kalin-Casey first shared her concerns about the service in an e-mail message to the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday. Since then, the Web has been buzzing about the privacy implications of Street View — with varying degrees of seriousness. Several sites have been asking users to submit interesting images captured by the Google service, which offers panoramic views of miles of streets around San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

On a Wired magazine blog, for instance, readers can vote on the “Best Urban Images” that others find in Street View. On Thursday afternoon, a picture of two young women sunbathing in their bikinis on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Calif., ranked near the top. Another showed a man scaling the front gate of an apartment building in San Francisco. The caption read, “Is he breaking in or has he just locked himself out?”

Google said in a statement that it takes privacy seriously and considered the privacy implications of its service before it was introduced on Tuesday. “Street View only features imagery taken on public property,” the company said. “This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Google said that it had consulted with public service organizations and considered their feedback in developing the service, which allows users to request that a photo be removed for privacy reasons. A Google spokeswoman said the company had received few such requests.

For instance, Google worked with the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which represents shelters for victims of domestic violence nationwide, to remove pictures of those shelters. “They reached out in advance to us so we could reach out to our network,” said Cindy Southworth, founder and director of the organization.

Not everyone believes the service raises serious privacy concerns.

“You don’t have a right to ‘privacy’ over what can be seen while driving the speed limit past your house,” wrote a Boing Boing reader, identified as Rich Gibson, in response to Ms. Kalin-Casey’s complaint. Others dismissed her as a crazy cat lady.

Edward A. Jurkevics, a principal at Chesapeake Analytics, a consulting firm specializing in mapping and imagery, said that courts have consistently ruled that people in public spaces can be photographed. “In terms of privacy, I doubt if there is much of a problem,” Mr. Jurkevics said.

Still, the issues raised by the service, thorny or merely funny, were perfect blog fodder. The hunt was on for quirky or potentially embarrassing images that could be found by wandering the virtual streets of the service.

There was the picture of a clearly identifiable man standing in front of an establishment offering lap dances and other entertainment in San Francisco. The site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

Others pointed to pictures of cars whose license plates were clearly readable. One pointed to images captured inside the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, a controversial location for photography in this high-security era. On Lombard Street in San Francisco, various tourists who had come to photograph the famously curvy street were photographed themselves.

Google said that the images had been captured by vehicles equipped with special cameras. The company took some of the photographs itself and purchased others from Immersive Media, a data provider.

“I think that this product illustrates a tension between our First Amendment right to document public spaces around us, and the privacy interests people have as they go about their day,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. Mr. Bankston said Google could have avoided privacy concerns by blurring people’s faces.

Back at her apartment, Ms. Kalin-Casey acknowledged that plenty of information about her — that she manages an apartment complex, that she was an editor at the film site Reel.com — is already easily accessible through Google and other search engines.

“People’s jobs are pretty public,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean they want a shot of their sofa on Google.” She has asked Google to remove the image of her building, which was still online as of Thursday evening.

When a reporter first arrived to interview her, Monty the cat was visible in the window.

Related:

The Lede: Scenes Through the Eye of Google

Boing Boing: Google Maps is Spying on My Cat, Says Freaked Out BB Reader

Wired Blogs: Submit and Vote on the Best Urban Images Captured by New Google Maps Tool

Google Maps Street View

Google Maps: Mary Kalin-Casey's Cat

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The buzz about Street View

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June 10, 2007 -- When it comes to snooping in cyberspace, internet giant Google is the online world's biggest brother, according to a new report. The California-based company, famed for its enlightened style of management, is painted in a less flattering light in the first attempt to rank internet companies on their respect for users' privacy.

The human rights campaign Privacy International, which conducts an annual audit ranking countries according to how they respect their citizens' privacy, has analysed the world's leading internet companies.

The firms analysed, including Microsoft, Apple, eBay and Yahoo, were placed along a spectrum ranging from black to yellow, with black signalling the worst invaders of users' privacy and yellow those that showed the most respect. Marks were awarded according to 20 criteria including how willing companies were to allow customers to delete their accounts, their privacy policies, the level of information they collected about users and the length of time they retained it. None of the companies made it into the yellow category, and only Google ended up in the black signifying it is 'hostile to privacy' according to Privacy International.

'We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy,' the campaign group claims in the preliminary report. In the report, Privacy International claims that:

· Users of Google's services must accept the company can retain a large quantity of information about them, often indefinitely.

· Google has access to additional personal information, including hobbies, employment, address, and phone number, from user profiles in its social networking service, Orkut.

· Google collects all search results from its Toolbar search service and identifies all users with a unique 'cookie' - information sent between a web browser and the server - that allows it to track users' web use.

Last night Google defended its privacy policy and launched a scathing attack of the methodology used to compile the report which it said contained inaccuracies. 'We stand by our record for protecting user privacy and offering products that are transparent about what information is collected and empower users to control their personal information,' said Nicole Wong, the company's deputy general counsel.

Growing concern about corporate and government control of personal information was expressed last week at an event hosted by Amnesty International and The Observer to mark one year of the Irrepressible.info campaign against internet censorship.

Watchdog accuses Google of invading the privacy of its internet surfers

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Google's privacy practices
Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel in charge of compliance, is the point person for growing criticism of Google's privacy practices. Wong spoke with the Mercury News about her job and Google's approach to privacy.

Interview with Google's Nicole Wong [mp3; 10:21 min; 4.7 MB]

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From eWeek:

Google is all about information.

It’s become the No. 1 tool people use to find information on the Internet. More troubling to privacy experts, though, is the amount of information Google has accumulated about us.

The Mountain View, Calif., company is continually raked over the coals regarding the massive amounts of PII (personally identifiable information) it collects, what it does with it, how long it retains the data and what the company might do with it if its merger with DoubleClick goes ahead.

That’s been ratcheted up to fever pitch during the past few weeks with two new privacy headlines: complaints being voiced about the new Street View service’s photographs getting too close for comfort and Privacy International flunking Google on its privacy policies and procedures in a report published June 9.

On the other hand, Google recently warned the German government that it will shut down the country’s access to Gmail rather than go along with a law, now being debated, that would require e-mail providers and ISPs to store users’ data in such a way that they can be identified.

It's this kind of action that Google's defenders say exemplifies the search behemoth's dedication to doing no evil to PII.

However, similar to Google's refusal to hand over search results to the U.S. government last year, the move doesn't convince privacy advocates. Every step Google makes to protect privacy is matched by a multitude of sins—with both sins and good deeds dependent on what they mean to Google's bottom line, privacy advocates say.

It boils down to one question: Is it OK for Google to own us? ...

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July 17, 2007 -- Google is to begin deleting private information it stores on the computers of millions of users, the internet giant announced today.

The company currently stores cookies - small pieces of information which help identify users - on computers for more than 30 years.

Under the terms of its new privacy policy, Google's cookies will now automatically delete themselves after two years.

The move comes as the Silicon Valley company comes under pressure from privacy campaigners and government regulators over its increasing domination of the web.

"After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies," said Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel.

"These steps are part of our ongoing plan to continue innovating in the area of privacy to protect our users."

Cookies are widely used by the internet industry to remember pieces of information about users, including their passwords, preferences and behaviours.

The practice is mainly used to make the life of surfers easier, but has sometimes proved controversial: two years ago it emerged that America's National Security Agency was secretly inserting cookies on to computers to keep track of the online activities of surfers.

It is not clear what the impact of the new policy will be. The expiry date only comes into force two years after the last time a surfer visits a Google page.

If an individual continues to visit Google's websites, the cookies will continue to renew themselves indefinitely.

The move is part of a growing attempt by the internet giant to address concerns about its power and influence over web users.

Since being founded just nine years ago, Google has become one of the most commanding technology firms.

It uses vast amounts of online data, collected from its millions of users, to sell highly profitable advertising on the web.

A report earlier this year from Privacy International placed Google bottom of its online privacy rankings and claimed the company had an institutional hostility to privacy.

Google responded vociferously to the accusations, pointing to its efforts to overturn a White House attempt to access data on millions of internet users.

But recent concern over the use of cookies has been spurred by the company's $3.1bn (£1.5bn) acquisition of DoubleClick, an internet advertising firm which has been controversial in the past for its use of invasive techniques.

The Federal Trade Commission, America's financial regulator, is conducting an anti-trust investigation into the deal.

Google yields to privacy campaign