Google Street View's looking at you...

 
By Robert Colvile

It's like the opening of a Hollywood movie. On the screen in front of you appears a view of the Earth, seen from space. Then, as you watch, the screen zooms in and in and in, swooping past countries and cities until you end up at what appears to be your destination, a bird's-eye view of your chosen street. But then, just as you think you're finished, a little bubble appears, a sphere of bustle and activity. Clicking on it, you're not merely viewing the scene from above, you're part of it – watching the swishing cars and bustling pedestrians as they go about their business.

For more than a year, mysterious vehicles with roof-mounted camera poles have been criss-crossing the streets of Britain's cities. Rather than unveiling the "Street View" function of Google Earth city by city, the Californian technology giant chose to open with a big bang – to make sure that yesterday, across the country, people were logging on to gawp at their homes and offices, gleefully alerting others to friends caught carrying their shopping or workmates who had nipped outside for a cheeky cigarette. Where once the aerial and satellite photos had peered down on us from above, now they were in our midst.

Tornadoes cause chaos across EnglandAnd, instantly, a tension develops. Google Earth is brilliant fun, and brilliantly executed. The scenes it captures are no more or less public than those you would see if you looked out of your window or wandered down the street. But they are now preserved for posterity, available to prurient peeping toms from Canberra to Cape Town. Already, there is a thriving online subculture capturing moments their subjects must wish had remained uncaptured: the drunkard passed out on the verge; the man appearing to walk into a sex shop; the student vomiting on the street. Then there are those who play up to the camera, plotting the Googlemobile's course to propose marriage, or baring their chests as they see the vehicle approach.

This cuts to the heart of a series of issues that society has long preferred to skirt around. The introduction of Street View in Britain and Europe was delayed after privacy campaigners insisted that faces should not be recognisable; but others might say that you have waived your right to privacy simply by being in a public place. Does it matter that the pictures were taken unknowingly, and by a company rather than by the state? Have we chosen, more generally, to trade privacy for convenience – to offer up every detail of our lives on Facebook, or to tote around mobile phones that know where we are, and are capable of broadcasting the information to our friends (and others)?

These are things we need to sort out, in our own minds and in our public policy. The reason is that Google Earth is only the start. One of the hottest phrases in technology at the moment is "geo-tagging", aka location-based technology. The idea is that the online world will eventually merge with the offline – that as you walk down the street, your mobile phone, earpiece, wristband, 3-D goggles or brain implant will alert you to whether your friends are in the vicinity, provide carefully filtered offers and discounts from nearby shops and restaurants, or pipe in your chosen critic's verdict on the films playing at the cinema outside which you are loitering (if, that is, they still have cinemas, and we don't simply download the latest release straight into our cerebral cortex).

Even if this seems like a fantasy, we should at least consider how we'd cope with it. Online services have exploded in popularity and potential over the past couple of decades, but they have done so in a regulatory vacuum – both public and politicians have been so slow to grasp what the geeks were up to, and so dazzled by the possibilities on offer, that they failed to consider the consequences of what was happening.

The result is that Google in particular has landed itself in a position of potentially terrifying power. For most of us, its home page is the gatekeeper to the world's information, with rankings on its search results a matter of commercial life and death for an ever-increasing number of companies. And when it came to cataloguing the world's books and digitising their contents, it was not a government or charity that took the lead, but the boys from California.

This isn't, by itself, a bad thing: unlike Microsoft, its predecessor as the alpha male of the computing world, Google might remain so pure of heart that it forswears the exploitation of its monopoly. But it's the kind of thing that we should probably have had a talk about. Instead, the only moment of real regulatory interference with the software juggernaut, at least that I can recall, came when one of the Street View vehicles was pulled over for driving in a bus lane.

For the reasons why this kind of thing matters, think back to the discovery of DNA – a revolutionary moment in science. When Sir Alec Jeffreys, of the University of Leicester, built on this breakthrough with the invention of DNA fingerprinting in the 1980s, it seemed an unmitigated good: an infallible way to sort the innocent from the guilty. Sean Hodgson, who was this week cleared of a murder committed in 1979, after spending 27 years in prison, ought certainly to remember Sir Alec in his prayers. Yet at the same time, the invention of DNA fingerprinting allowed the Government – until checked by a court ruling – to build up a genetic database of astonishing proportions, using information culled from everyone who had been arrested, whether or not they were subsequently convicted, or even charged. In the wider scientific community, there are similar debates taking place about the ownership of life itself – the extent to which particular genes that companies isolate, or create, belong to them rather than the common weal.

In terms of technology, and the tensions and trade-offs between privacy and utility, we are at the same stage now as Sir Alec was back then. Exponential increases in computing power and capability mean that the resolution of Google's images can only increase, just as the frequency with which such images are taken, whether by Google or by others, will very probably approach – and reach – the instantaneous. In other words, in the future, there will very probably be a camera on you always and everywhere, just as your location will be plotted (along, quite possibly, with your skin temperature, recent food consumption, and general state of mind). Science fiction has conjured up such a world before, of course – but the George Orwells always envisaged that it would be the loyal lieutenants of an all-seeing state who would monitor and act on the information, rather than specialist algorithms written by a company trying to work out when and how to sell you pizza.

On Google Earth, the trip from the Houses of Parliament to Google's London headquarters takes about a second. In reality, the walk is slightly longer – 15 minutes or so up Victoria Street. But in terms of understanding and shaping our digital future, the geeks in the big glass building are miles and miles in the distance.