There is something about the relationship of a person and an Internet search engine that should involve complete anonymity. We type in a few words, they belch out a few more. Generally speaking, such an arrangement works well, and we don’t have to worry about whether somebody from the other side of the globe is viewing our house at that instant. Unfortunately, in parts outside of Canada, people do. Google Maps has implemented a “Street View” function, which allows users to zoom close enough to identify faces or license plates. Fortunately, in Canada, where reason and thought process play a much bigger role in politics than they do in the United States, this spiffy new Google feature will require the blurring of faces and other personal objects.
Is blurring really enough? There are always other ways to identify someone, namely by their body type or clothing, or even by where they are located. An eerie camera-happy world is steadily descending upon us, slipping into our streets and our intersections subtly, feeding the concept of privacy to a new technological monster that wants to see everybody in great upclose clarity. We have cameras virtually everywhere. They’re placed strategically on intersections, in schools, in stores, in workplaces, and even in some public washrooms. Our world is bloated with clever ways to monitor and control.
There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the cameras we encounter on a day-to-day basis and those that would allow us to be seen from hundreds, even thousands of miles away by people we’ve never met. The former protect us from theft, vandalism, and other such threats prevalent in society today, and the latter are there simply for the reason of… wait, what are they there for exactly? Surely purchasing a simple road map at the local hardware store shouldn’t be that hard. And if Google is assuming that people need to zoom in that close to find a location, then their picture of humans in general is unintelligent.
Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act requires all private companies to obtain consent from individuals before making public any image of them, which may affect the Google tool’s introduction to Canada if the images are not sufficiently censored. All this being said, the question remains: is this enough protection? Do we really want our houses, not to mention us, displayed on the Internet, where millions will have access to the images, blurred or not? As individuals, we should maintain strict personto- computer relationships that exist with search engines like Google. We search. They give us results. They don’t publicly display where we live or what we’re doing sitting on a park bench eating an ice-cream.
