If you haven’t tried Google Earth, or haven’t looked at it recently – you really need to take a look. What you will see should scare the hell out of you.
Google Earth’s “Street View” seemed innocent enough – it started out by having someone in a car driving around San Francisco taking pictures of the buildings downtown and making those pictures available integrated in with the satellite imagery and maps.
What’s changed is the scope of what they have done. It isn’t just a few big cities with a high curiousity level and interest from tourists – they have now sent their cameras to pretty much every street and rural road in America, taking 360 degree pictures every couple hundred feet and placed it all online on the internet.
Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, they produced deliberately wrong maps as disinformation to prevent the United States (and possible future and past enemies like Germany) from having an accurate understanding of where cities and roads were and identifying targets of military or economic significance. Entire cities (like where their nuclear weapons programs were conducted) were not even shown on the maps.
Google Earth has essentially put pictures of every road, every house, every business in the Entire United States on the internet for anyone in the world to access without restriction. With 2 pictures of the same object from slightly different locations, it is possible to create accurate 3d measurements.
Google is not the government (yet), but this should cause you to have some thoughts about the conflict between the freedom of the first amendment and the government’s need to provide security. Some countries in Europe are starting to push back on Google Street View.
What do you think the United States should do? (if anything)