What would have been a more ethical way to implement Google Street View?

Google Street View is a feature in Google Maps and Google Earth that allows users to view streets all around the world. In the Vaidhyanathan article, it states that many countries such as the Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, United States, and Japan have all of their streets featured on Google Street View. This made problems for people, since when it first came out, they all said that it was too invasive of privacy. However, Google defended their service by saying “that if anyone reported an image as troubling , embarrassing, or revealing of personal information such as their faces or vehicle license plates, Google would be happy to remove or smudge the image”. Yet, their default settings are on maximum exposure. Although this setting opposes privacy, people’s worries for the feature eventually die down after a few weeks. In the case analysis study, I argue that the consequentialist ethical tool could show that Google should’ve just made it so you could see the locations of local businesses and organizations. 

Floridi’s central concepts are privacies as freedom from, information friction, and… The privacies as freedom from are 4 concepts that Floridi discussed in the article. One of them that I think relates to this topic is informational privacy. This is defined by the freedom of intrusion/invasion of information that is unknowable about people. In Google Street view, they show pictures of people at places that others may not know that they go to. This is an invasion of privacy because the person doesn’t know that they are being photographed in these images, until it’s too late. Another example is mental privacy, which refers to the freedom from psychological intrusion, thanks to restrictions from others’ being able to mentally ruin people. If there is an embarrassing image of someone on Google Street View, it could potentially ruin their lives and mental health because it is photographed for the public to see and laugh at.

 Information friction is a central concept that explains the opposition of the flow of information within an infosphere. Floridi went into detail and explained how information friction works within a scenario of 4 students between a thin wall. On one side, the students could hear what the others were talking about as well as for the other side. An example of this for the purpose of case analysis, someone could use pictures of a random person’s house for a youtube video on weird places on Google Maps. This would mess up the infosphere since it enables other people to look for that house and maybe go to it to look at, which causes invasion of privacy. 

Consequentialism focuses on the consequences from actions that people take.  In the context of the analysis, consequentialism could be used as a way to explain the consequences that affect others on using Google Street View. Rather than admitting their wrong doings and replacing some of their default settings, Google decided to defend themselves on why they exposed people’s houses and license plates. The right thing for Google to have done was to learn from the complaints and reports and remove the maximum exposure setting as the default for everything.  

In the Grimmelmann article, the central concepts are the myths of privacy and privacy as product safety. Each myth goes into detail about how privacy is ultimately decided by the user and either the user doesn’t care or it is unrealistic. This would be supported by the fact that after a few weeks of reports and complaints from users who were on Google Street View, they would go back to using it without any problems. Google could argue that this is ultimately a choice for users because even though some of them had privacy problems with the website before, they decided to go back on. The myth that would best fit this scenario is that users don’t care about privacy, since their actions towards the situation with Google Street View shows evidence to support that. 

However, privacy as product safety would put a different view on the topic. Privacy as product safety in the article was used to explain the complex relationship between Facebook and user privacy. The users would input information about themselves that can be socially hazardous for them but can also be a social benefit to making new friends online. This can be said for the relationship between the users using Google Maps and Google Earth and Google. Since there are some benefits of using Google Street View to find a restaurant you used to go to or to see what a place looks like from the perspective of the google camera, it could be argued the consequences of using Google Street View depend on the user’s intent and not entirely on the website itself.

A utilitarian would think that Google Street View continuously exposing random people’s private information could cause them to suffer bad consequences. Their beliefs are built off of good actions equate to maximum happiness and bad ones equate to suffering. So, if users are using the feature for good then they would find happiness, but if they use it for bad then they will have to face the consequences of getting sued or maybe even jail time. This could be used to state that the right thing to do with Google Street View is implement database regulation so that there is only the necessary information required for users to do a 360 view of, as an alternative to having every city and small town in the world exposed for everyone to see. 

The position that I stand on in the case analysis is that Google made some unethical decisions when making Google Street View, but with improvements it can be fixed. The improvement that they should definitely fix is maximum exposure being a feature or the default setting on Google Street View.  No matter what app or online feature it is, privacy should be the top priority for users and the organizations who are making the apps or features. This is because if there is no foundation for privacy, then it could lead to disaster. The maximum exposure setting has caused lots of problems for people in the article, an example being the couple that sued Google for trespassing on their property because they took a picture of their driveway and house. However, others would argue that Google Street View can take a picture of someone’s house or anything that could be a probable case of invasion of privacy. Their reasoning could follow that since Google Maps and Google Earth were made with the sole purpose of showing everything in the world/earth, then it would make sense to have all of this information on there. They could also argue that it wouldn’t be Google’s fault since they don’t have any control over what the cameras take pictures of. The flaw in this argument would be that Google themselves said that they can blur addresses and license plates if users had any issues with these types of things appearing on the Street View feature. There is a flaw in my argument as well that consequentialism could’ve been a weak ethical tool to use to defend my claim on a more ethical way for Google to implement Google Street View. It would’ve been best to use the solutions that I came up with when using the articles to support my argument, instead of trying to input the ethical tool as a stronghold for the argument. Ultimately, it is up to Google to come up with a way to solve the problem for its users so that people can have privacy, while also using Google Street View.