Some see trouble in digital mapping, photo sharing

By Heiko Lossie and Christof Kerkmann May 9, 2010, 11:44 GMT

Berlin - Digital mapping and photography can bring the world closer together. The problem is, for some people, that's too close.

Where travellers see great ways to track where they're going, data protection advocates see voyeurism. And the trend is only growing.

Hobby photographers are putting their pictures up on services like Flickr while tourism agencies are posting webcams to highlight their promenades and beaches. Meanwhile, mapmakers aren't just producing paper maps, but detailed online city plans with images linked to specific street addresses.

More pictures of our world are always finding their way online and, thanks to Google, Bing and the like, a lot of them are only a click away.

It's clear who is using these services. Vacationers tired of pouring over travel brochures would rather click to a webcam to check things out themselves to see if there's a nearby disco or whether the beach is as close as advertised. People considering moving can check their neighbourhoods out digitally without leaving their home.

The services are also helpful to those on the go. Anyone with a multimedia mobile phone can use it for directions to the closest Mongolian restaurant, checking out the menu online while underway (assuming the establishment has posted it online). Once that's done, the mobile can then help the user find the train schedule for the way home.

'Our vision is to bring the entire internet into one map,' says Raphael Leiteritz, responsible for Google's StreetView project in Europe. The system links panoramic views of individual homes to satellite maps.

And the search giant isn't the only one who wants to recreate the map. Microsoft has a similar service - Photosynth - up and running in 56 US cities. Users can upload images or panoramic videos and link them to a site, making them generally available or only to those in a group of friends.

It's a profitable business, since advertisements for businesses near area searches is probably the future of navigation.

But the amount, quality and connectivity of the data is making some nervous. After all, it's not just vacationers and those considering moves who are looking at these images, says Thilo Weichert, a data security officer in Germany.

'Street View can be used completely differently, such as in the real estate and banking industries, when, with a click, original properties and credit analyses of customers can be pulled up.' He admits other companies offer these services, but not packaged so nicely.

Criminals can also use the services to make money, another major concern. Thanks to online mapping, no fence is high enough to keep out prying eyes.

In one example, a Finnish man sitting naked in a recliner on his property was caught by a Street View camera mounted 2.9 metres above street level. The fact that his face was digitally blurred was a small consolation. In Britain, a woman filed for divorce after seeing her husband's car parked at a friend's house at a time when he'd told her he was elsewhere.

But Weichert warns against making Street View the only concern of privacy advocates. 'It's just the tip of the iceberg.' He insists these issues aren't just digital, they're real. 'When it's about pictures of yourself of the front of your house, the topic quickly becomes more concrete,' he says.

The real question is how to cope in a world where so much data is available via a mouse click? There's also the issue of the digital tracks we all leave online to consider.

'The problem is that our data security laws date from a time when people were thinking about heaps of paper and maybe telephone conversations, not a seamless internet phenomenon like today.'

He advocates a more modern, global data security. But not everyone is on the same page. Jeff Jarvis, a publicist and professor from New York, says on the blog Re:publica that things that are public belong in the public domain. Forbidding images like those on Street View is absurd, he argues.