Professional Ethics

Privacy is a right that people in the United States have but it is not something that many people often think about on a daily basis. What do you think life would be like if you were not to have any privacy whatsoever? In The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan we were able to read about Google Street View and how universalized surveillance has ultimately become. When Street View came into play it didn’t just go to the United States. Street View also came out in places like France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. This program worked for some people in the fact that it helped them with things like jobs. However, it raised an extensive amount of privacy concerns for people all over the world. While people like Cory Doctorow found a lot of help throught Street View, others like Osamu Higuchi see it as a program that is causing harm and not considering Japanese culture (Vaidhyanathan). The theory of consequentialism mainly focuses on the consequences of actions that people choose to take. A theory of consequentialism specifically is utilitarianism. Someone who follows this theory believes that consequences can only be justified if they are increasing goodness. A consequence should improve happiness while decreasing suffering. In this Case Analysis I will argue that consequentialism and utilitarianism show us that Google should have addressed and fixed the issues they had to make it so that people weren’t suffering becuase of the privacy concerns that Street View presented. 

Luciano Floridi is a philosophy and ethics professor at University of Oxford. One of his main focuses is digital ethics. In his paper “Privacy: Informational Friction” he tells us about what it is that makes privacy valuable and how it makes itself valuable. One concept that Floridi introduces is that privacy is self- constituting and that idea aligns exactly with the instincts we already have about privacy and why it is important. Another concept Floridi introduces is ownership-based interpretation. This interpretation is saying that we as individuals all are the owners of our own information and interfering with the privacy of others information is in a sense just like stealing it. It also holds that every individual’s privacy “..needs to be respected because of each person’s rights to bodily security and property..” (Floridi)

When looking at the case on Google Strret View and all the privacy concerns that come with it, you can see a lot of the ideas and concepts Floridi talks about in his books relating to a lot of what we are seeing in the case of Google Street View. One of the concepts of privacy being self-constitutiong relates to the case in the sense that people saw value in the privacy they had with programs like street view not existing. However, once they felt that their privacy was being invaded the concept of ownership-based interpretation can come into play. Regarding this case ownership-based interpretation is in a way threatened because of the fact that the pictures that Street View is taking and putting on the internet have the potential to be a threat to both bodily and property security.

 Instead of recognizing the real threats to individuals’ privacy, Google decided to say they care about privacy and blur out faces. Looking through a utilitarian viewpoint one would believe that the action of releasing Street View doesn’t have good consequences. In order for consequences to be there needs to be more good and less suffering but you also need to do what is best for the overall greater good. When Street View came out there were people who used it for work and appreciated the ways it helped them. However, there were a lot of people in different countries and cultures that were unhappy with pictures being taken of their homes, license plates, kids, pets, and even themselves. If Street View was helpful to few but harmful to many that would mean the consequences were bad, therefore the action was not justifiable. I believe from a utilitarian standpoint that google should have been more willing to discuss how much they care about privacy. I also believe that they could have done more work to ensure that they weren’t invading an individual’s privacy, especially because there was not any type of consent for the photos that were going on the internet for everyone and anyone to see. Speaking from a utilitarian view there is a lot that can potentially be wrong with things like Google Street View and the universalization of surveillance.

James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, is the author of another article that can connect to this case, “Privacy as Product Safety.” In the reading Grimmelmann talks about privacy and how users make decisions about privacy on things like social media. He specifically spends a lot of time talking about Facebook users. Most social media companies have extensive amounts of data on individuals that people might not even realize. This now raises questions on how your privacy is protected and what safety risks can come from it. In this generation there are a lot of people who like to put their whole lives out there on the internet but that does not necessarily mean that they are not concerned about their privacy. One main concept that Grimmelmann introduces is the idea of “Privacy As Product Safety.” This means that naturally there is a correlation between privacy laws and product safety. Carrying on with Facebook as the example he talks about how it can be dangerous using social media because of things like privacy risks but that doesn’t mean it is destined to harm every individual user. Grimmelmanns ideas on privacy and product safety can apply to a lot of different companies especially ones like Google who face privacy issues with a lot of their products.

The concept of privacy as product safety can also align with the case we read on Google Street View. Products Google releases like Google Street View can raise a lot of dangers in the same sense that Facebook could. For example, the family whose toddler ended up naked on the internet because of a picture taken by Street View. There was no real way to know how many people saw or downloaded the picture before someone realized it needed to be removed. This situation highlights the issues of privacy and product safety being put in jeopardy and that is not the only situation that has done this. There have also been issues where entire neighborhoods are affected by the possibility of their privacy and safety being compromised. This happened in a village called Broughton where a resident blocked a googlemobile from driving in order to get them to stop taking images of the area. They called the police and got other residents in order to get them to stop doing what they were doing because they were afraid that their information being on the program would only attract burgulars. This is important because it brings up the idea that privacy and product safety are both important concerns when it comes to any interface that lets an individual’s information be accessible anywhere on the internet.

Grimmelmann seems to share some utilitarian views when it comes to how he views privacy and product safety. He talks about how Facebook could in a way be compared to a hammer, in the sense that they can both be dangerous but it does not mean that they aren’t necessary. In my opinion, Google needs to hold themselves accountable for the fact that Street view poses some real ethical concerns because of the fact that they pose risks to an individual’s right to privacy.

In summary, I feel that Google Street View poses a lot of risk to a person’s privacy and from an ethical standpoint the consequences their actions have cannont be considered necessarily good. One could argue that Street View can be justifiably good because it can help people with things like work or to navigate around an area. There is also a large portion of the population that isn’t necessarily concerned with pictures of their streets, cars, or even themselves being on the program. Therefore, it can possibly be seen as utilitarian because it is creating happiness of sorts. Another reason this argument could have a problem is that Google has done work to make sure people can report images where they feel like their privacy was invaded and they would work to remove it. However, once something is public information there is no telling how many people have already seen it. These points could potentiallly be drawbacks in my argument but I do feel that through that ethical viewpoint there are still bad consequences for enough people that it is not doing the job or creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Google and many other large companies and corporations for that matter are always going to have a lot of ethical concerns when it involves individuals personal information but there are an infinite number of ways they can choose to work on those problems in order to do what is right and do what is best for the most amount of people.

Works Cited

Floridi, Luciano. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press, 2016. 

Grimmelmann, James. “Privacy as Product Safety.” Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute, 2010, scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1539/. 

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). University of California Press, 2012.