The Googlization of Everything

From the draft of my Street View chapter:

2.2 "Street View" and the politics of pervasive surveillance

In March of 2009 Google debuted its "Street View" service as part of Google Maps in six cities in 25 cities in the United Kingdom. It caused instant uproar among the British public. Newspaper columns decried Google's new surveillance power, worried about Google's influence on daily lives, and questioned the service's utility.

This service allows users of Google Maps to take a 360-degree view of streets and intersections in (as of early 2009) the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, in addition to the United States and the United Kingdom. Google captures these images by sending automobiles (Vauxhall Astras in the United Kingdom; Chevrolet Cobalts in the United States; Toyota Priuses por "Prii" in Japan) with special cameras mounted on their roofs to drive every street in a city.

When Google Street View debuted in the United States in 2007 it sparked similar reaction as it did in the United Kingdom in 2009. Launched first in May 2007 in New York, San Francisco, and a handful of other large cities, Google Street view now covers most of thousands of small towns across the United States - even tiny Charlottesville, Virginia (population 50,000). At first, American users flocked to the service to check if there were embarrassing or revealing aspects of their own lives as they discovered their abodes captured by Google's global eyes. Many commentators declared the service to be too invasive, too embarrassing, and too revealing for comfort. Google, in its standard style, defended the service by saying - as it always does - that if anyone reports an image to be troubling, embarrassing, or revealing of personal information such as clear faces or vehicle license plates, Google would be happy to remove or smudge the image. But, as usual, the defaults would be set for maximum exposure.

In the United States, the critical suspicion of Google Street view faded after a few weeks. Over time, as no horror stories emerged, Google users got used to the odd new function and started coming up with creative ways to use it. As I followed the reaction across the Atlantic in the spring of 2009 I wondered to what interesting uses my fellow Americans had put Google Street View in the two years since its launch. So I solicited some input via Twitter, Facebook, and my blog. Overwhelmingly, my respondents (overwhelmingly technologically adept and educationally elite) reported using Street View to scout out potential homes. Some used it to assess the prospects for parking in a busy area. Others wrote that they often remembered where a restaurant was but could not remember its name or precise address to offer to friends when recommending the place.

A few of my responders had particularly interesting applications for Street View. David de la Peña, an architect based in Davis, California, uses it daily in his work:

[Google Street View] is a very useful tool that I use regularly on community design and streetscape projects. It saves me from the drudgery of taking hundreds of photographs of a site, and the user interface is more intuitive than flipping through, say, 100 photographs of a street. For community design projects, it allows designers to see a neighborhood scene more or less from eye-level perspective. When we see a neighborhood from this experiential level, rather than from an aerial photograph, we have a better shot at creating more livable environments. The eye-level views also allow us to verify elements of a streetscape that just aren't apparent from a plan or an aerial photo, such as architectural character, yard and porch layouts, and tree types. For streetscape projects, the eye-level views give a very realistic view of a street's character, which are comprised of building facades; types and varieties of street trees; locations of street lights and power poles; and arrangements of drive lanes, bicycle lanes, parking and sidewalks.

I started using it as soon as it was available. I immediately saw it as a useful tool to be added to my toolbox. Before [Google Street View], we relied primarily upon aerial photographs, MS Live 3d aerials, and photos we would take ourselves. Of course, none of these replaces on-the-ground research. I have been using [Google Street View], for example, on a project near Sacramento that is located 30 minutes from my office. We are trying to locate a new community center and park within a low-income neighborhood on foreclosed fourplexes that the city owns. GSV gave me a better sense than any other visual tool about the feel of each of the potential sites. Today I visited the sites to confirm our intuitions and to take more photographs. While walking the neighborhood, I was approached by eight different neighbors asking what I was doing. People naturally get suspicious when you're taking pictures of their homes, but if you're open to talking with them, other doors will open. I met a few single mothers who had great suggestions for locating a tot lot, and an on-site building manager who had suggestions for how the city deals with code compliance. These chance encounters gave me more information than any visual tool could, and more important, they helped me to establish as sense of trust.

And Cory Doctorow, an author, blogger, and free-culture activist told me that he had used Google Street View to describe in detail a scene in San Francisco when he was writing his successful young-adult novel, Little Brother. Here is the scene from his novel:

I picked up the WiFi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up O'Farrell, just before Hyde Street, in front of a dodgy "Asian Massage Parlor" with a red blinking CLOSED sign in the window. The network's name was HarajukuFM, so we knew we had the right spot.

Doctorow wrote to me that he had written much of the novel while living in Los Angeles, but had done a lot of globe-hopping during that time as well. "I think I was writing from Heathrow that day, or possibly Croatia," Doctorow wrote. "I know O'Farrell pretty well, but it had been a few years. I zoomed up and down the street with [Google Street View] for a few seconds until I had refreshed my memory, then wrote."

One counter-example to the general acceptance of Street View was the case of Aaron and Christine Boring, a couple living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Concerned that Street View included clear images of their driveway and house that sat far back from the street, the couple sued Google in April 2008 seeking $25,000 in damages and alleging Google had effectively trespassed on their property through the power of its lenses alone. The judge in the case dismissed their claims in February 2009 because the couple had not taken the simple step of requesting that Google remove the offending images.

By 2009 Google Street View, perhaps the most pervasive example of the Googlization of the real world, barely causes a gasp in the United States.

The reaction in Britain in 2009 echoed the American reaction from 2007 - but with a few significant amplifications and ironies. On the first day Street View was active, Google had its busiest day ever in the United Kindgom with a 41 percent increase in traffic. Google already controlled more than 90 percent of the Web search traffic in the United Kingdom.

The problems that first day were fairly predictable: a few embarrassing scenes caught on camera; a few sensitive sites had to be deleted upon request. But then, the press coverage revealed that Google officials misrepresented some important aspects of the service. In a speech at the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit announcing the launch of the service in the United Kingdom, the head of Google UK, Matt Brittin, said that he had discussed the security implications of Google Street View with Metropolitan Police in London "and they have said it actually helps track and monitor crime." And Ed Parsons, a geospatial technologist for Google, told The Guardian that Google's automatic image-blurring technologies detect and scramble "99.9" percent of the faces and license plates in the index.

Google quickly undermined its credibility in the United Kingdom by handling its public relations in an uncharacteristically sloppy fashion. Two days after Street View debuted, the British public learned that Brittin had never discussed the project with London police. As a spokesperson for Scotland Yard told The Independent, "We have not been involved in discussions with Google regarding their product development." And that claim from Parsons that Google catches "99.9" percent of faces and license plates automatically turned out to be "a figure of speech," as a Google spokesperson had to admit to the Independent. "The technique is not totally perfect," the spokesperson said. "The idea is not to blur every single face, only those that can be clearly identified."

The ensuing fury was quite spectacular and exceeded any such concerns that had popped up in the United States two years before. A former criminal wrote a column in The Sun claiming that Street View would be a "gift to criminals." Former Prime Minister Tony Blair had to request that his home be removed from the service. And thousands of people requested that Google remove specific images of their homes and businesses from the service. Bloggers quickly found and copied embarrassing images from Street View, including a man vomiting outside a pub, a man exiting an adult video store, and a naked child playing in a park. Despite Google's quick action to remove all these troubling images from the service, they remained part of the larger Web - easily discoverable via Google Image Search.

But ultimately, Google did not suffer long-term damage from these high-profile incidents. If anything, the voyeuristic interest generated by the news coverage and peer-to-peer buzz about Street View enhanced Google's presence in the country.

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