I just discovered this cute video from Google Japan showing how Street View works. There was an interesting debate in the press earlier this year regarding Street View in respect of people's privacy. The Wikipedia entry cites details of cases around the world where Street View has been called into question over invasion of privacy.
It even prompted human rights body Privacy International to complain to the UK's Information Commission Office (ICO), who rightly concluded that the risks of invasion of privacy for the majority of people was very small and that it was not in breach of the Data Protection Act. After all, it's not illegal to take photos or film anyone in public, so long as you're not harassing them.
All that aside, as someone who frequently uses many of Google's wonderful free products, it got me thinking about how much information they hold about us, and at what cost to our privacy?
After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Actually there is, but moving on...
When you look at the number of products (see graphic below) that have quickly and seemlessly integrated themselves into many aspects of our lives, you realise just how powerful all that information could be if they were to start mining information across their range of products.
How many of these Google products do you use?
Here's the full list.
Clearly Google is all too aware of users' concerns in the area of data privacy, which is why you can now monitor all of the products you use with the new Google Dashboard. This allows you to tweak all of your settings and delete any data you don't want stored.
And what a lot of data they store.
Still, they wouldn't be smart enough to do anything with it, would they?
2 comments:
Interesting topic. I wonder what people really think as it could have dramatic effect on Google. I've created a qulse to see what people think about this at http://qulse.com/#q/42
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