Ever since Google’s street view service was debuted there have been “many discussions over its privacy implications”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Google+Street+View%22+privacy&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=G0c&pwst=1&start=90&sa=N. I’ve found most of these fairly overblown, but this morning I started to get a better sense of what some of the concerns might be about. Writing on the SMH’s news blog, Matthew Moore “writes”:http://blogs.smh.com.au/newsblog/archives/freedom_of_information/013696.html approvingly,

bq. Mr McKinnon reckons you can hardly have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street when every second person has a video camera or mobile phone and when Google is now using street-level maps with images of real people who have no idea they have been photographed.

I suspect we’ll see FOI campaigners (who are often attorneys for sensationalist media outlets) running this kind of argument more frequently. If that’s right, it suggests there is potentially a deeper problem with street view than just what it immediately does. It isn’t that street view arguably involves borderline privacy violations. It is rather that the existence of street view diminishes our expectations of privacy and hence, given the way privacy law works, turns what would have been clear cases of privacy violation into borderline (or non) cases.

I don’t have any clear thoughts about what the policy consequences of this might be. What I suspect we’ll have to see in the future is a move away from the ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ standard to a more explicit list of the cases where privacy is legally protected, even though (given modern technology) people don’t expect this legal right to be upheld in practice. That would be a shame in some respects; standards like the reasonable expectations standard that are flexible and sensitive to real-world conditions generally make for better law than lists handed down from on high.

(I should add that I think the FOI campaigners are in the right over the case Moore is discussing. The person claiming to have their privacy rights violated was either involved in or standing around a fight that broke out at a taxi rank outside a nightclub. There’s neither a reasonable expectation of privacy there, nor a public policy that is served by granting privacy rights.)