“We take privacy concerns seriously. All these images are taken on public streets. It’s exactly what you could see walking down the street.” –Stephen Chau, product manager for Google Maps, on Google Street View

Yesterday, Google launched its Street View feature for Google Maps which allows users to view photos of city streets. The problem is, the photographed subjects never agreed to have their pictures taken. From a legal standpoint, what we do in the streets is public, but we didn’t expect that these things might be captured by cameras and stored in a vast digital archive accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Now our expectations concerning privacy need to be revised with the advent of new technologies like Google Street View. Of course governments, banks and stores have been capturing images of people for years, but unlike Google, they don’t have the financial incentive to make this information publicly available in order to generate traffic. Street View certainly doesn’t help Google’s reputation with privacy watchdog groups, but ultimately, Google’s not interested in invading people’s privacy—but rather in how their collected data can be monetized.

For more of my views on Google Street View and privacy:
On the Media: Street Photographer – interview with NPR
Peek-a-Google - Forbes Op-Ed