Google’s total privacy
The incident
At the end of July a small PA lawsuit gained relatively wide coverage when Google, who was being sued, filed papers with the court that mentioned how satellite imaging impacts privacy. The story is interesting not because of what Google said, though that is what most stories focused on, but because of what it shows about the public sensitivity towards Google on matters of privacy.
Background
Back in the spring, a couple in Pittsburg sued Google for posting pictures of their home on the company’s Street View map of the area. They claimed that having a “private road” sign on the street made Google’s picture taking a “grossly reckless invasion on Plaintiffs’ seclusion” and that publishing them in the Street View map of the area caused them “mental suffering and diminished the value of their property,” for which they sought $25,000 in damages from Google, and the destruction of the pictures of the house.
While the “private road” sign might make you wonder whether the pictures should have been taken, the idea that taking them caused mental suffering and diminished the value of the house, or that $25k is somehow warranted to make amends, those just seem far fetched. The couple’s claims seem even worse once you find out that the county’s Office of Property Assessments already had a picture of the house on their own website, as well as a floor plan and details about the price the couple paid for the property, the age of the structure, and the size of the lot.
What Google said, in context
In their reply to the couple’s complaint Google points out that similar pictures of the house were already available on the internet. They also point out that the view of the house is not really private at all, being routinely viewable to the several other families on the road, delivery and salesmen, and other members of the community in the common course of going about their daily business. As additional evidence that no invasion of privacy occurred, Google cites the Restatement (Second) of Torts. The Restatement series are:
highly regarded distillations of common law. They are prepared by the American Law Institute (ALI), a prestigious organization comprising judges, professors, and lawyers. The ALI’s aim is to distill the “black letter law” from cases, to indicate a trend in common law, and, occasionally, to recommend what a rule of law should be. In essence, they restate existing common law into a series of principles or rules.
In this case Google quotes a section dealing with the idea of complete privacy, saying:
[c]omplete privacy does not exist in this world except in a desert, and anyone who is not a hermit must expect and endure the ordinary incidents of the community life of which he [or she] is a part.
Which Google follows up by saying “Today’s satellite-image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist” (Google’s filing), a single sentence to help bring the 1977 Restatement into line with our current realities.
Regardless of the comment’s brevity and the fact that Google’s point about satellite imaging is entirely correct, seeing Google state that “complete privacy does not exist” was enough to get people upset and talking about it. Even in the context of elaborating on a quote
Why?
Why did this sentence, or rather the second “no complete privacy” half that most of the coverage focused on, get people upset? Other people have said similar things, and in context it is clearly uncontroversial. But this time Google is saying it.
As a result of their success, Google has become something of a bag man for the information age. They know about the things you like, and the things you are curious about, and they probably know where the bodies are buried. So when they talk about the limits, or lack thereof, of modern information gathering, people get nervous. Even if what they say is obvious, or uncontroversial, or has been said many times by others. It is one of the reasons that bag men don’t talk much, though of course that just adds impact to the few things they do say.
They understand privacy better than we do
People are nervous because Google has them at a disadvantage. Our social sense of privacy is in a period of flux, still adapting to the rise of computers and the digital networking of information around them. The first half of making that adjustment is knowing just what information is currently being kept quiet and what information we are all broadcasting to each other. Google has a pretty good idea, most of us don’t. Though attempts have been made at documentation.
What should bother you
You don’t know
While the privacy implications of Street View are interesting to talk about, it is only a single instance of a larger problem. In the world before networking, we had photographs of every building in every city. Some few iconic pictures became famous and were accessible to a wide audience, but the majority remained in the hands of the original photographer or a small collection of people around the photographer. The change from that world to the world we are entering where all our pictures get networked, and overlayed, and geo-tagged, and are in general becoming available to anyone with an internet connection at any time, that change from isolated pockets of information to wide pools of networked information does just as much to change our expectations of privacy as the movement from small towns to cities.
The thing is, everyone who has moved from a small town to a city, or from a city to a small town, can tell you about the changes in privacy expectations that come with the move. Both ways of life are familiar enough that the trade-offs of space vs. anonymity are well understood and there are social coping mechanisms to help people adjust in either direction. But when I talk with people about the rapid networking of personal information online, about the power and knowledge of your life that you give to other people when you feed everything you do online through other people’s social networking sites and webmail, the changes are so new that there is no vocabulary, no set of examples with which to illustrate the new trade-offs.
It is hard to put your finger on…
Right now, it is hard to even talk about the social impacts of this networking, about the changes in power relationships between family, friends, businesses, and government because those relationships are still changing. Except for an increased risk of credit fraud and the still mention-worthy instances of people fired based on information from social networks, the larger social consequences of personal information networking have not yet started working through society. Because of this newness most of the public discussion of these issues is reactionary, like these pieces about the PA lawsuit. Over time we will move past reaction. Private records of presidential candidates will continue to be inappropriately accessed and large databases of personal information will continue to be lost by government and private industry alike, until it becomes clear just what kinds of new illicit behavior are made possible by all this new information.
In the meantime, I’m trying to work with my boss on a book that will explore how some of these changes can impact the historical social and power dynamics embodied in our legal system and government. Even if contextualizing the issues doesn’t give us a crystal ball to see how they will evolve over time, it should give us a better understanding of what the stakes are and structure some of the wild reactions, like these and other privacy stories about Google. Hopefully it will help the conversation.
Update:
Looks like the case was dismissed because, among other things, “[t]he Plaintiffs have failed to plead — much less set out facts supporting — a plausible claim of entitlement to injunctive relief”. Not surprising.