Thomas at Technical Blogger has a great write-up of Google’s intrusion into everyone’s reasonable level of privacy expected when you’re out and about.

I have to thoroughly agree with his observations on the matter. The images they put out for everyone to see could lead to some serious invasion of privacy issues. I wonder just how many “secrets” have been exposed because of Google’s oversight in releasing this tech too early. Microsoft will clearly come out looking like the saint in this particular field, although they didn’t make it to “market” first. Why? Because they’ve taken the extra time to filter out faces, license tags, etc. that could be readily identifiable. That’s definitely the way to do things and not be evil. Google’s motto is slowly but surely falling by the wayside as they get bigger and bigger methinks.

Google apparently has an option where you can request removal of an offending image by reporting the offending image within the interface, but that’s a pretty poor way of going about it. Do they expect us to cruise around our virtual city streets that we travel for real every day just to see if we got snapped by Google’s invasive camera van? They should just pull the street level pictures altogether until they do it the right way like Microsoft is doing. If they wanted to follow their motto of “Don’t be evil”, they would, but I don’t really see that happening.

Do you?

Ian from The Newsroom posted a CBS news video clip of the story.

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