Your House In The Virtual World

APRIL 4 - Pittsburgh Pair Claims Privacy Invaded By Posting of Home Photo -- A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant's popular "Street View" mapping feature has made a photo of their home available to online searchers. Aaron and Christine Boring accuse Google of an "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their seclusion and privacy since they live on a street that is "clearly marked with a 'Private Road' sign," according to a lawsuit the couple filed this week in Allegheny County's Court of Common Pleas.

If you've never used Google's Street View feature on Maps, you can watch the short introductory video below and then (just a little bit farther down) try the functionality out for yourself with the embedded Street View map of Anchorage, Alaska.

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I intentionally selected a not-so-heavily-trafficked residential area to demonstrate the more intrusive side of Google's Street View. As you can see, you have a front-row seat to just about any house in the neighborhood, and if you zoom in, you can walk right up the driveway and onto the porch of some of the homes. It's understandable that habitants dwelling in Street View-able areas might be concerned. Millions of strangers can freely roam the streets and inspect the layout and landscape of any house near a road. For those with children, this is even more alarming. What a convenient tool for potential predators and burglars! Even more worrying, perhaps, is knowing that this is just the beginning of our home privacy concerns. Take a minute to watch the PhotoSynth demonstration below.


While Google's Street View might be too close for comfort to some, the potential of PhotoSynth digs deeper, reaching degrees of privacy invasion that even the more carefree individuals might consider threatening. According to an article on ReadWriteWeb,

The Street View maps are developed in partnership with Immersive Media, which, according to the O'Reilly Radar blog, is "a company that has an eleven lens camera capable of taking full, high-res video while driving along city streets." What that means is that these Street View maps, because they are extracted from video shot while driving, are not just static images at random points around the city. They can be advanced fluidly down the street.

In order to create the Street View experience, Google had to send out vehicles equipped with these super cameras to roam the city streets. I don't think we need to worry about them getting too much closer, because I doubt the day will come when cameramen are knocking on our doors, asking to be let in our homes to film for Google Maps.

PhotoSynth, on the other hand, isn't limited to the resources of a single organization. Because the technology utilizes the metadata associated with each image, it doesn't matter where the media is coming from. If it's available on the internet and properly tagged, it can be used to construct a three-dimensional representation of the real world. Pictures taken at parties, holidays, or during rainy afternoons lounging around the house, whatever the occasion, are fair game if they're posted online. And because of the nature of our photo-sharing (Facebook, WebShots, Flickr, blogs, personal webpages, etc.), it wouldn't be hard for friends, family and peers to tag any information that might be left out. Before long, anyone could take a full tour of your home or business from the comfort of their computer chair. Even one album of photos might be enough to reconstruct the interior of a building.

The end result? If the proper precautions aren't made, then just about anybody might be able to take a virtual tour of the inside of your house. A cool technology in many respects, but with the benefits we'll need to take the privacy and security issues as well.