Google street view case analysis

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

Privacy is a sensitive topic that triggers comments from all angles whenever it is being mentioned. Many people experience a high amount of stress whenever they feel their privacy is about to be encroached. Continuous reassures relieves such people of the stress, and they continue about their lives. In this case analysis with a reading by Siva Vaidhyanathan, I will be discussing some ethical privacy views that should and could have been analyzed for a better implementation of the “Google Street View.” Due to technological advancements, the world has become such a global village that distance and location are no longer hidden. Google street view was implemented as far back as 2007 in a few paces in U.S cities to include New York and San Francisco, giving visual access of any address to individuals via the satellite database. Google Street View is such high technological surveillance introduced for various reasons. Many think this makes it easy for strangers to stalk people and even gives viewing access to criminals when they need to survey a neighborhood. quite a number of internet users quickly fled to the new services and found many embarrassing and revealing images of them, which has probably been taken down today. These are but the few unethical parts under discussion today that bother a whole lot of people. I will be applying the Ethics of care toolof ethical reasoning to suggest how google developers could have taken measures to protect people’s privacy and assure individuals a sound mind.

From the fourth Revolution book by Floridi Luciano, we read the various practices for privacy. There are mainly four different forms of freedom or privacy that should be considered when interacting with others, with the first being Physical Privacy. Physical privacy is freedom from sensory interference or intrusion. Physical privacy is achieved by restricting others’ ability to have a bodily interaction with another or invade another individual personal space.  Some people do not have physical privacy when it comes to google street as their house faces the wrong direction. It has not yet been seen where google has caught images of anyone outside their property acting a fool or doing embarrassing things, but it happens that quite a few have been caught on camera in an unpleasant form. There was a complaint from japan that relates much to this point where someone walking down the street was staring at the resident or invading their privacy physically. The only few ways this will be of concern is if stalkers actively use google maps to locate people’s homes and harass them. In that regard, we will also need to consider mental privacy: this goes as far as analyzing an individual’s state of mind and its stability. It is studied that when people begin to lose a grip of their private space, they tend to become mentally unbalanced and radical. It is a very criticall point to consider. The second form of privacy is Decisional privacy. In this aspect, we are considering the right against unwanted interference in their decisions and actions. When this occurs, individuals are forced to create boundaries to help them escape from their interferences, be it family affairs, work, and other personal stressful issues going on around them. The fourth and final one will be informational privacy. This form of privacy helps people to set apart personal informational distractions. Consider a situation of an employee in a big firm of over 500 employees, and he or she hears a rumor about herself that is not true. Informational Distraction is how the individual helps deal with such news. Another concept of Florid that hits home regarding this privacy is Anonymity. Floridi defines anonymity as the unavailability of personal information due to the difficulty of collecting or correlating different bits of information about someone. It may also be known as a lack of identifiability. An example in this situation is if a celebrity, renowned lawyer, or a high-profile individual has his or her address leaked, then anyone could just google search his or her street and see his or her residence to attain more information that just the house and street. Newly attained information could include the year, make, and model of their cars, licenses plates and items on the property to include playground if they have children. In using these forms of privacy, Google, as an industry that can have a diverse effect on people, can implement measures to make their Google Street View much safer and assure individuals their safety net is not broken just as much as their homes view. In applying Ethics of Care, google could have made the program as though they or their families would be posted on it. They could have employed adequate safety measures to filter photos of people and places that appeared unpleasant. Ethics of Care explains how showing favoritism and preference towards people we know and have ties with and not a random stranger is a moral failure. The Google team was well aware of the google street application and how it operated but never announced it for public awareness on preparations for the photos. However, it can be said that some of the employee’s family members and close associates knew.

Jason Grimmelmann’s reading article elaborates on the concept of “privacy as product safety,” with some facts laid out for consideration regarding privacy on Facebook. A few myths were fact-checked in this article surrounding Facebook privacy. It started with claims that Facebook users do not care about privacy. As explained by Grimmelmann, that is not true. In as much as people go on Facebook and post a lot of personal information that may include location, year, make and model of the car they drive, their families and friends, and other things, they try to select who should read or see such information. That right there is an act of privacy. As much as they post all that information, they make a conscious effort not to make it viewable to the general public. This effort shows that many Facebook users care about their privacy by constantly monitoring who can see their posts. Others choose to only post about themselves, and things they know and feel will not expose their privacy in any way. The second myth is on how Facebook users make rational privacy choices. The fine prints that are supposed to be the privacy policy are either too tiny to read or too complex to understand. Facebook should never forget that not all users are actually educated, and the fact that most people speak English does not mean they can read and understand all the legal jargons that come in the fine print. Also, sometimes, the privacy policy is just too long to go over. People want to understand with the least amount of words possible. I will not appreciate reading a two-hundred-word privacy policy to post a five-word statement on my timeline. Another myth is that Facebook user’s privacy desires is unrealistic. As the writer stated, if one does not want his information out there, they should not post it for the world to see. To an extent, this is quite agreeable because, according to the study, information posted online is relatively hard to control and hence could be duplicated and shared with the unknown. Then again, it was noted from the onset how the network was not designed to be fully public with an individual account accessible by all and sundry. As Grimmelmann explained, this was meant to connect small groups and family and friends for open forum discussion from far and wide. This was also with the idea that family members in distant locations could keep up with occurrences back home. Another complicated point of contention cited was that database regulation would make privacy safe. Grimmelmann went ahead to cite limited data collection, complete disclosures, and no secondary usage as essential ideas in the database-centered model of privacy protection. He argued that they do not get to the very bottom of user-to-user connections while it is essential. We can apply all these concepts to the google case in many ways. At the beginning of this project, I am confident that Google only assumed that people would not care about the Google mobile strolling through their streets recording footage for the street view services the same way people do not care about Facebook privacy. It is also stated that as far as people are out of their houses in the front yard or the street, they would not care about their privacy. That is also not true. Sitting in front of one’s home should not erode his or her privacy under any circumstance. Both these services (Facebook and Google) lack ethics of care. They did not think about people’s privacy in any case begin with. Not everyone wants their property to be displayed to the public. There is a reason why ethic of care is not incorporated into law; it is certainly because it is not a duty but an emotional component. It should come with our sense of humanity. Humanity should care about each other as morally and ethically as possible.

Finally, As stated at the beginning of this writing, privacy is a tough nut to crack, and different people consider privacy on different levels. What seems private to person A might be public to another individual. It will be an individual’s responsibility to define what we as individuals consider private and place all the security we feel it deserves to make us feel safe. This is why I feel google should have used Ethics of carewhen designing this program. They should employ a separate entity to physically go over all the pictures and blur our embarrassing images that invade people’s privacy. Better still, they could design algorithms that can make that possible if hiring was a problem. Personally, I do not have a problem with the view of my property as I see it on google because it is a well-defined and secured community, but not everyone has that luxury. Google being the reputable company we know it to be, will always be held to a higher standard in every case.