ON PRIVACY ISSUES WITH GOOGLE STREET VIEW.

• Date: 22 September 2020
• Author: Gallo, Patrick

1. INTRODUCTION

   "There's an app for that!", the known past response for any one person looking to digitize just one piece of their life with their mobile device. Now, we look to the second version of this single statement: "There's a service for that!" By the notion of the second statement, corporations like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others look to the need of the people and see a service or desire of the world population to accomplish a goal, wherein, a mobile app most certainly is developed in conjunction. Google is only one of these such organizations, finding many needs for the world in the area of technology and providing many services and apps for a diverse range of platforms. From ad service to personal and corporate video chat solutions, Google has introduced a wide portfolio to help businesses and individuals accomplish their mission set. (1)

   Google has been in the news for various privacy breakdowns since its inception in 1998, however, various new products have pushed the envelope and activists often push for steps further to combat data privacy weaknesses or security of those in judicial requests. (2) Google came under the control of a parent-company, Alphabet, during a restructuring of assets and personnel in 2015; which coincidcntally made Google a bit more "slimmed down." (3) The founders of Google, then Stanford University students, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page sought to make sense of the information out on the Internet, meaning to organize and make available such data based on closest possible terms. (4) For a massive data company, Google has become in its short lifespan already, nearly twenty locations around the globe house data centers, with hundreds of thousands of servers located at each, with custom hardware optimized for the multitude of products and services such a company offers. (5)

   Privacy for Google has become a concern, both in its business practices and its cooperation with government entities for legal inquiries. A present, past, and future act for many corporations, including Google involve the acquisition of smaller services, apps, and projects to improve or assist in the rollout of completely new solutions. One such historical acquisition for Google involves a 2004 buy of a small entity which specialized in a mapping language, Keyhole Mapping Language ("KML"). (6) Keyhole first combined three-dimensional imagery used in video game graphics with mapping data to create three-dimensional figures which today form the basis of some of the iconic "flyovers." (7) One of the last big-name customers before its eventual acquisition by Google was In-Q-Tcl ("IQT"), a United States intelligence community not-for-profit research "strategic investor." (8) Google's eventual acquisition of Keyhole was a strategic move, as, at the time, about a fourth of searches on Google were originating toward Keyhole data sources and tools. (9)

   Google Earth and Google Maps, the platforms we know and love for providing views of our houses, being the base for a lot of map inlays on websites and the means by which we make it to our destinations. A specific evolution of these services first arrived in mid-2007 with the release of Street View, a product revolutionary at the time to provide virtual walkthroughs of sites and street driving from the standpoint of a 360-degree world. (10) Street View first began with simple filming from vehicles in larger cities, however, data gathering has since evolved to mount cameras in backpacks, on bicycles, on tripods, or other means of transportation to provide "access" to places traditional vehicles may not be able to go. (11) The process for imagery collection involves complex analysis of weather patterns and dozens of images fused together and presented in optimal conditions prior to its publishing on the web. The fused images then produce a 360-degree view which the end result allows for panning with a touch screen in the mobile app or with the click of a mouse from a personal computer. (12) Street View touts itself as a place where "...imagery enhances your experience ... is useful... and reflects the world ..." That being said, in nearly fifteen years of development, Google has worked to quickly identify misuse of the platform, such as the posting of terrorist content, explicit images, and intellectual property violations, among many. (13)

   The rest of the paper is laid out as follows. In Section II, the technical backgrounds of Google Street View, Google infrastructure, and use cases for such data gathered are explained. Section III takes into account the potential privacy risks of Street View technology, the public's adoption of these possibly invasive technologies, and national security risks imposed as a result of public access to data. Section IV lays out potential liabilities of other products and practices done by Google, noting email advertising and web tracking in principal. Section V outlines practices of Google's competitors, behaviors of other platform data sources, and activity some entities have taken politically to back a "fundamental human right" of privacy. Finally, Section VI presents concluding remarks.

2. TECHNICALLY A FEAT

   In the terms and conditions of becoming a partner toward Google Street View, a standard of quality for contributions exists, on the magnitude of seven and a half megapixels per image (or larger) and no filters. (14) In 2008, the company began testing a technology to blur the faces, license plates, or other identifying marks of a person or place, especially those which may have sensitive ramifications if revealed. Google faced similar concern by the public when the introduction of the now standard and expected views of our houses, offices, and other locations became available in Google Maps. Per a quote of John Hanke, then-Head of Maps and Earth products for Google, "... it took time ... It needs debate ..." (15) Google faced concern in the area of images being live, which they are not, more populace areas, such as Washington, DC or New York City face more frequent updates to Street View products than forests of northern Russia, due to the interest of the imagery; Google Earth faces a similar imagery update timeline. (16) As more corporations begin competition in mapping platforms, two major players have emerged, Apple with Apple Maps, and Google with Google Maps. Both of these corporations have worked extensively to photograph the Earth from eye level, even both publishing updates to web pages to allow the public to be aware of the locations up for filming from vehicles which drive around the country filming and in the process also updating the accuracy of general mapping data. (17) This process is especially important as a new series of GPS satellites and receivers have been released and imagery first published.

   While companies are generally quiet about their networks, Google has published documentation on peering, the act of interconnecting services and fiber physically in regions across the globe to better service their own infrastructure and other organizations via sharing fiber lines. The PeeringDB, a sort of online phonebook for Internet Service Providers ("ISPs") lists Google as being connected to nearly seventy peering partners at a nearly equal number of locations globally. Google utilizes these partners at length to provide connection streams into its network ranging from capacities of ten gigabits to eight hundred gigabits. (18) The further network analysis, especially in documentation released by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed as a portion of programs Google and other technology giants were tapped into by way of internal fiber lines between facilities, which forced Google in 2013 to begin encrypting private network traffic. (19)

   In means of humanity, several products have come as a result of mapping data, mass gathering of data, and spiders, a technique used to crawl web pages and provide index information for search results. Google Earth Engine, a product released in 2010 provides countries with many natural disasters a way to analyze gathered data to plan for development, see and predict future land change, and prepare...