The German government met with Google and other Internet executives this week regarding their concerns about the privacy of personal geographical data. The concern arises primarily from the company’s StreetView technology, which has raised widespread concern in the country. Despite the unprecedented move by Google to allow any German property owner to opt-out of having their home or business appear in StreetView, the German government insists that more must be done to define privacy or the industry will face legislation. The next step for online mapping companies is to draft a charter that guards the privacy of geographical data, and they’ve been given a deadline of Dec. 7 to comply.
While this a country-specific demand, where are the industry groups to respond to this request? This is not a Google-specific mandate, and the entire global geospatial industry stands to be affected by any legislation. There are legitimate concerns regarding online geo privacy, and it seems like the time is ripe to address these issues collectively so that privacy issues don’t curtail the important insight provided by these tools.
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It’s a balance in this global world, where the benefits of open data are becoming increasingly obvious, and data collection methods are becoming increasingly crowd-sourced and cheap. If you start putting in privacy laws, where do you stop? Am I going to be restricted from posting geo-tagged photos? Is high-res aerial imagery going to be restricted? What about ge0-tagged high-def video? Sensor-web data? etc.
The real issue in my mind is the use of that data. Right now the data is mostly (at least to public eyes) being used to sell us more stuff.
Restricting access doesn’t stop the data from being used for other purposes, good or bad. It also doesn’t stop people from being stupid, and posting in publicly accessible places that they’re away on vacation, live at a specific address, and the keys are under the doormat. Trying to stop people from being stupid or malicious with legislation is not helpful, surprisingly they start relying on the government more and more to stop them from being stupid, and suddenly you live in a society where it’s nobody’s fault, so let’s sue them because they didn’t tell us the coffee was hot.
So maybe let’s focus on the potential uses of the massive amounts of geo-spatial data that’s becoming available, and focus on education for the stupid/malicious people.
Well that’s my rant for the day…