[A sign on the northern Soviet border, c. 1975]
Regular readers will be aware that I am firmly of the opinion that any company which finds it necessary to claim that it is not evil is, in fact, evil, and that therefore I do not do any business with Messrs. Google, nor use any of their services. What I know about their Street View service is therefore merely what I read.
The Independent reports that
Google was forced to remove photographs of naked children from its Street View service last night as a row over internet privacy escalated into one about public safety…In a fresh twist, the Metropolitan Police denied claims by Google that it had been consulted about Street View prior to its launch. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: “We have not been involved in discussions with Google regarding their product development.”… The company’s discomfort was compounded by a former criminal, Michael Fraser, who wrote in The Sun yesterday that Street View was a “gift to criminals”. Germans in the country’s northern state of Schleswig-Holstein are threatening to take legal action against Google … Google’s spokesman for northern Europe claims, however, that Germany’s streets are public property and that the concern does not need a permit to take pictures.
Regular readers will also be aware that I was at one time a professional photographer, and have rather strong views about the freedom of the individual to take photographs in public places.
My opinion of Google is a very low one and I would not be at all surprised to discover that the company which made its name in the internet world by pandering to the censorship imposed by the Communist tyrants of China is now involved in some kind of antilibertarian shenanigans with western governments.
Nostradunderclass predicts: Google will make what appears to be an embarrassing climb-down, and will apologise left and right, and do all sorts of technical stuff, and will publicly accept that anyone, even a huge American corporation, that wants to take photographs in public places in Europe needs to have a permit of some kind to do so. And so it will be. Mysteriously, Google will not appear to suffer any financial loss as a result of this procedure, and will in due course be given permits as required, local objections being over-ruled, possibly by the EU.
Leaving all other photographers throughout Europe to face the sort of totalitarian restrictions for which the Soviet Union was once notorious. Resulting, perhaps, in the estate agents mentioned in the article finding it less hassle to buy their property photos from Google rather than go through the expensive mill of obtaining a permit to take them themselves.
So what’sto become of the billions of phones with cameras embedded, or the billions of ordinary camerae owned legally by people?
What ought I to do with my Olympus-Pen half-frame collection? (With a number of lenses and adaptors?)
Will there be a new crime of “passive photography”? (The stress and affliction suffered by an Officer of the State, on being photographed.)
Will there be an “amnesty” for cameras, all of which will be steamrollered?
Truly, we shall have entered the antechamber of The Endarkenment.
What if “optical devices” are forbidden? Will I be able to read? Will it even be allowed?
What I wonder about is all the footage from all of those CCTV cameras, all of the time. Somehow we never hear about that.