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To make one thing clear: these are not live photographs, so you can’t sit at a computer and wait for someone to leave their house. It is a huge patchwork of photographs, mostly taken last summer, forming a tapestry of British street scenes, a kind of Domesday Book for 2008.
Obviously a few awkward scenes have emerged — one man photographed leaving a sex shop is clearly shown to be wearing a rucksack, something that could expose him to a lifetime’s ridicule in better circles. And Oasis’s Liam Gallagher hurriedly denied claims he was the figure seen gesturing at the camera outside the Queen’s pub in Primrose Hill (http://snipr.com/f3yrl) as he ‘never wears Reeboks with legwarmers’.
Yet, given the area covered, it is amazing how few scandals have emerged; nothing to the furore caused in France when authorities abandoned the practice of sending speed camera photographs to the owners of offending cars since they too often revealed mystery companions. All the same, many people claim they feel invaded. To me it’s much less questionable than online aerial photographs, which have existed for some time; after all, I have an expectation of privacy when in my back garden or on my roof which I don’t really have at the roadside. A few critics inevitably cite the risk of paedophilia, as though the location of schools was a secret until now. Others rather fancifully mention stalkers. If nothing else, the service will help stalkers maintain a lower carbon footprint, since they will no longer need to trawl the streets in their obligatory white vans.
You might argue that Google should announce when they are planning to film in a particular area so the more bourgeois of us can tuck our wheelie-bins out of sight. But that might be too much of a temptation to pranksters. Spare a thought for the Berkshire family who were surprised to learn that there was a 60-foot phallus painted on the roof of their £1 million country house (http://tinyurl.com/cku92o) — their 18-year-old son’s bid for fame on Google Earth.
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Also by Rory Sutherland
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