A few months ago, Google Maps launched a value-added application called “Street View.” Basically, it consists of an interactive montage of point-of-view photos from street level, navigable in such a way that it simulates standing on the street in the specified location. To collect the images, Google sent an unmarked van out to certain cities within the US, to drive up and down streets photographing everything; these images were later consolidated in a giant database that generates POVs like this:

In other words, it shows home addresses, private property, and plenty of hilarious candid moments like people picking their noses or waltzing out of porno shops clutching brown paper bags. Naturally, some people were quick to complain, and others were just as quick to point out the obvious: your property or your person, and what you were doing with it, was public, visible from public property, and therefore, shut your face.

This wasn’t enough to prevent frivolous suits from being filed, like this one, reported by the New York Times, about a woman who objected to the fact that her cat was visible in the second-storey window in an image of her home. Or this couple, who went from anonymity to the subject of high-profile mockery when they sued Google for making public images of their private road (which certainly isn’t private anymore – the address is on the first page of the suit, now viewable at The Smoking Gun). Canada’s privacy commissioner (Canada has a privacy commissioner?) hinted that such a tool might contravene Canada’s privacy laws, prompting Peter Fleischer, Google’s top privacy counsel (Google has a top privacy counsel?), to promise to blur images of people in street-level views, if the plans for a Street View of Canadian cities proceed as planned.

This should satisfy Canada’s privacy laws because, oddly enough, the law does not discriminate based on the capturing of people’s images on private property versus on public property – only with or without their consent. This is why the SkyDome has notices posted at the entrance telling you that your presence implies consent to be thrown up on the JumboTron.

This represent a curious inversion of the usual issue of privacy on the Internet. Typically, we imagine our privacy on the Internet being violated by people monitoring our online actions – the things we buy online, the porn we look at, and so on. In this case, the Internet is supposedly violating our privacy by reproducing our offline actions – things we do in public, and which we can’t reasonably claim have ever been private. That is, if you pick your nose while walking down Yonge St. and a thousand tourists see it, you can blame nobody but yourself, since you knew you were in public. Yet if your image was captured and reproduced online and a thousand surfers saw it, you can supposedly blame Google, for re-making public what started out as public but then became private once it was captured on camera.

Personally, I find this absurd, and worse, I think it confuses the already murky subject of online privacy. It’s bad enough that people see what they do online as private (which it isn’t, as I will explore in a subsequent post). To validate the errant sense of privacy one feels while in a physically public space is illogical, and creates different standards for what constitutes a private act based on the way the act is viewed by others.

Make no mistake – if people are able to monitor your actions, without penetrating the opaque walls and window-coverings of your domicile or other privately-owned chamber – then your actions exist in the public sphere (de facto, if perhaps not de jure). To define privacy based on peripheral concerns like mechanical reproduction, or whether one uses a private computer to access the very public Internet, is legal hair-splitting, and defies not only common sense, but also defies our attempts to wrangle reasonable privacy policy out of the emerging world which blurs the distinction between online and offline.