What happens in Vegas may end up on Google

If you think Americans still have some control over their personal privacy, it may be time to think again. Lately, camera-bearing Google Maps trucks have been driving around Southern California, taking street-level photos to be incorporated into the Web service’s online maps – and stirring up controversy as well. With Google’s new Street View feature, now available in nine metropolitan areas (but not Cincinnati), you can take a virtual drive up New York’s 5th Avenue or across Los Angeles’ Wilshire Boulevard. It looks cool, and it’s highly useful, for example, for potential home buyers, or for travelers who want to become familiar with the route they’ll be taking.

But it has brought unintended consequences, the Los Angeles Times reported last week. As soon as the new Street View sequences had been released for the San Francisco Bay area, for example, bloggers had posted shots they had found of recognizable individuals “caught in the act” by Google’s cameras – sunbathing, getting traffic tickets, walking into an X-rated book store. One man was caught sitting on a park bench picking his nose. Instances of nudity and public urination were taken down. Finding unusual images on the Google maps has quickly become a sort of voyeuristic sport among California bloggers.

Google promised to take “inappropriate” images off the site if people complain – even though it really doesn’t have to. Legally and practically, you can have no real expectation of privacy on public streets. If you’re embarrassed when friends drive by while you’re getting a speeding ticket, that’s just tough.

The difference here is that these random little actions are documented for posterity – and may come back to haunt you. Imagine a prospective employer seeing a shot of you sauntering into a porno shop. Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was caught sneaking a cigarette in a Google street shot, told the Times: “My life will go on. But it makes me worry about the people exiting Alcoholics Anonymous, an abortion clinic or a controversial religious or political meeting.”

Bankston and other privacy advocates want Google to blur all the faces caught on its Street View maps. “We expect some degree of anonymity in our lives. How does one maintain a free society when all of your activity is scrutinized?” he asked. He may be overstating things – it’s not “all your activity” but a frozen moment – yet his point is valid. Google’s project is just one of a growing number of creeping intrusions by public and private entities to document what we do. In total, they can threaten our increasingly fragile concept of a free society. Then again, if that quote attributed to Mark Twain is correct, Cincinnatians won’t have to worry about being caught picking their noses on Google until 2027.