Nicolas at Pasta & Vinegar has an interesting piece quoting from a story that ran in Italy about the effect of the Google Streetview project in Rome. Streetview is where a fleet of Google cars cruise selected areas of the planet filming continuously. The film is then uploaded to Google Maps allowing users to get a street view (that must be where they got the name from!) that you can zoom in and out of, as well as view in a 360 degree panorama. It’s pretty cool, if you haven’t used it.

But all is not sweetness and light and the service has attracted a fair share of controversy, mainly from people and organisations concerned about privacy issues.

In Rome though, the cars seem to be provoking realtime behaviour, as pedestrians are actively trying to avoid being filmed as if the black cars are some new and sinister breed of predator stalking through the streets.

“On cue, pedestrians shuffled off the street and into bars, out of sight of the offending vehicle, no doubt wondering if these are the new intrusions that must be endured after a sudden shift to the right [Italy has just voted in a right wing government]. Your correspondent managed to snake through a queue of cars at a traffic light to get a better look at the vehicle that upset so many mid-afternoon espressos.
(…)
Just then the Google car swung left and I followed, in a very slow pursuit. The identical scene unfolded before me: Romans stumbling into shops and bars, hoping to be out of view of the camera’s lens“

It seems a little insensitive for the cars to be black - it really does pander to the 1984 or Cold War kind of atmosphere, as they slowly drive around, silently filming everything around them. But it also seems that we need to be talking a lot more about how this kind of operation provides benefits, how peoples’ privacy isn’t going to be compromised (assuming this is true) and that it’s generally a cool and froody thing for society.

Of course, that’s all very well. But if regime change were to happen, or if the wrong kinds of people ended up running Google, or if Google (or any other organisation which collects and stores data about individuals) was forced to hand over this information to less wholesome third parties, this beneficial project could have very sinister implications indeed.

My concern though, is that we’re just letting all this happen without having a proper debate about it. We may very well decide that projects like this are great. But surely we should make that decision and not have it made for us.

The picture is from the Netherlands by Lars van de Goor. But it’s hard not to project some kind of menace into this shot. And you can see why they might make people nervous or even afraid.