STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - I had one of those quintessential moments of the Internet Age the other day: I saw the Google Street View car going down my block in Stapleton.
"Look!" I said to my wife. "It's the Google car!"
You would have thought I was a kid again, spotting the ice cream truck. Funny the things you can get star-struck about.
It wasn't an overly impressive vehicle. Just a standard Hyundai sedan. What distinguishes the Google car, of course, is the camera rig on the roof. A big triangular brace topped by a blue camera that looks like a pair of eyes, taking a 360-degree image of the street that's then put online.
So, yeah, at first I was excited. After all, I do use Google Maps.
But there was something about the way the camera looked like pair of eyes (or, actually, more like a mask) that got to me. It reminded me of just how under surveillance we are, often without our consent.
Because who gave Google permission to come down my block and film my house? Sure, anybody with a cellphone could come by and do the same. But Google broadcasts that image on the Internet, making a picture of my home and the car parked in front available to literally billions of people.
The company has defended itself by saying they are photographing public places. And if an actual person's image is somehow captured while they are taking pictures, they blur the faces. They'll blur the house image as well. Privacy preserved.
Sure, my house is on a public street. Sure, people walk and drive by all the time and see it. My house is not a secret. But does that make my home fodder for a private company's camera, an image for them to catalogue and keep on file and use for God knows what purposes?
And what about my family's security? Any burglar could use that easily available Google image to case my house for a robbery. What about information that stalkers could gain? Why should I have to go to the trouble to tell Google to blur my house? Who gave them the right to photograph it in the first place?
Maybe I'm being a little paranoid. But other countries have complained about Google Street View as well.
In India, there was criticism that having these images so readily available helps terrorists to more accurately plan attacks. People in Japan have said that Google Street view is nothing but an open invasion of privacy. In Austria, Google Street View was caught scooping up data from unsecured wifi networks in addition to taking photos. Google has tangled with Germany and Canada over privacy concerns as well.
In some countries, the company has been forced to lower the height of its Street View cameras to avoid shooting over fences and hedges.
But it's not just Google. It's all part and parcel of the brave new world that we're entering more deeply into day by day.
Amazon has facial recognition technology called Rekognition, which uses artificial intelligence to identify objects, people and places in video or photos. The technology has been sold to police departments, meaning they can track people in real time, even if they're not criminals.
Talk about profiling. Think of the database of images that the police or anybody else could compile with this technology. Just because I'm out in public doesn't mean I give my consent to be catalogued.
Oh, and the Alexa device, which helps you play your favorite tunes, compile your shopping list or turn your lights on and off, recorded an Oregon couples' private conversation and sent it to a random person on their contact list.
I'm sure it was just a glitch.
I know, I know. I'm on the road to becoming that old guy in the dystopian movie who lives off the grid and has no electronics. The guy who remembers rotary phones and how we used to take our film to the drug store to be developed. Who remembers how we used to have to actually leave our homes to shop for food or clothes.
And more and more, I'm thinking that that's not such a bad thing to be.
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