Privacy campaigner vows legal challenge to Google Street View

Boooring

First thing: I can walk down pretty much any residential street I want and look at people, I've never had anyone pester me for a permit or some kind of viewing tax.

Second: There's thousands of hours of news footage of people walking down streets. Should we ask the BBC to fork over a couple of million to cover this gross invasion of privacy, or should we start living in the REAL WORLD and realise this would be insane?

If Street View let you click on cars and link to a page of the owner's information, that would be bad. It is ridiculous to suggest there is anything different between walking down a road looking at a car and doing the same thing on Street View. Street View's worse because it happened several months ago! Stop whinging. Either stay in your cave all the time rather than just popping out occassionally to moan, or join this thing called "society".

Do not be tricked into giving up YOUR freedom because of something Google does.

I'm firmly on the side of freedom of photography in public places in this argument. Simon Davies is completely tilting at windmills here. It's a shame because he's done good work in the past, but he's really called it very wrong this time.

It is my goddam innate irrevocable human right to walk around public places taking photographs and to do anything I want including publish, exhibit, give away, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate and/or sell those photographs afterward.

If I have that right, and I do, and so does every single one of you, then so do the people working at Google, and there is no grounds to deny it to them without denying it to ourselves too. If you argue Google should be stopped, you're using the same specious bullshit "it's ok when some people do it but not when others do it according to my personal whim" argument that the stupid and repressive plods are always using when they try and stop people exercising their legal rights to take photographs of exactly what they can see with their eyes anyway in public places.

Screw you if you're so precious that you can't bear the idea that you might be on one of them - if you can bear being seen in public by other human beings, fucking stay indoors and never go out you emotional cripple. Don't try and force every single other person in the world to have to go around with a bag on their head so they don't accidentally catch sight of you one day and upset your pathetic feelings.

The "I own the rights to my image" argument is bullshit too. It's a pattern of light waves bouncing off your face in a public place and it is NOT YOURS. If you want to prove ownership, let's see you retain control of those photons eh? You don't own the rain because it falls on your head, you don't own the sunlight because it falls on your face. It's nonsense in law to claim to "own" or have property rights in something you have zero ability to control or restrict others' access to. I have every right to place a photo-sensitive film in the path of the light rays bouncing off your face and there's nothing you can do about it. (If you insist that you do own those photons, I'll have you prosecuted for assault for throwing them at me! Go on, stop doing it if you can!)

Oh dear...

.. won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!?

P.S. I for one welcome our new photo-taking overlords.

Kelvedon and Witham in Essex

Last week I saw the Google car in a couple of Essex towns so I supposed I have been Googled twice!

Go Google Go !!!

Way to miss the point

Even if a photograph is taken without consent, there's still a world of difference between it being kept in someone's private photo album for occasional harmless amusement of their friends and family, and being displayed to all and sundry on the Internet as the bait for money-making advertisements.