In California, Google responded to California State Assemblyman Joel Anderson’s (R-San Diego) concerns about Google’s privacy policies yesterday by stating that “Google takes privacy very seriously.”
However, in Pennsylvania court documents released the same day, Google stated, “privacy does not exist.” Google’s privacy statements yesterday came on the heels of comments by Google “Evangelist” Vint Cerf to the Washington Technology Alliance’s annual luncheon in May where he explained that “nothing you do ever goes away, and nothing you do ever escapes notice… There isn’t any privacy, get over it.”
In response to an invasion of privacy lawsuit from Aaron and Christine Boring in Pennsylvania, Google stated yesterday, “Today's satellite-image technology means that even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist.” Google’s court filing noted that “every step upon private property is not deemed by law to be an actionable trespass.” The Boring’s lawsuit was prompted by a “Google vehicle—outfitted with a 360 degree panoramic camera on its roof—dr[iving] down a private road to take images of their Oakridge Lane home.” Google conceded that the photos were taken during a "brief entry upon their driveway."
Ken Boehm, Chariman of National Legal and Policy Center, responded, “Perhaps in Google’s world privacy does not exist, but in the real world individual privacy is fundamentally important and is being chipped away bit by bit every day by companies like Google. Google’s hypocrisy is breathtaking.”
To demonstrate his point, the National Legal and Policy Center today released a document demonstrating the threat to personal privacy posed by Google and Google products. Simply using Google Street View and Google Earth, the Center compiled a startlingly comprehensive amount of personal information on a top Google executive in less than 30 minutes, including the license plates of cars outside the executive’s home, the landscaping company the executive uses and even the name of the next door neighbor’s home security company.
The report also includes the distance from the street to the executive’s front door, the most likely driving route the executive would take to Google’s Mountain View headquarters and photos of the stop signs, stoplights and intersections the executive would pass along the way. The Center is publicly releasing the document today to highlight the invasiveness of these Google technologies to individual privacy.
“There is no better evidence that individual privacy simply does not exist in Google’s world than by the chilling amount of detailed visual information Google now collects on all of us, information that any Internet user can now compile in a dossier in less than 30 minutes. The fact that every American is now subject to this type of scrutiny with the click of a mouse is frightening.”
The National Legal and Policy Center is a not-for-profit organization focused on ethics and accountability in public life and private business. The organization is a strong supporter of property rights and has become increasingly alarmed at how technologies like Google’s Street, Google Earth and other Internet technologies have eroded American’s fundamental right to privacy.
You can view the Google Street View document at:
http://www.nlpc.org/pdfs/googleexecutive.pdf
Source: NLPC
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