I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to move.
Move from my house, that is.
The reasons are, I think, fairly acceptable to most people: My wife and I just put the mortgage to bed — a prodigious accomplishment in this economic climate.
We recently rehabilitated the house's federalist-style facade, giving our 126-year-old abode the look of something worth saving through the 21st century.
And, with other urban renewal inching forward again around the neighborhood, I finally feel confident about walking to the grocery store and not see someone pull a gun on me before I get there (Yes, this has happened to me once already).
The one thing I'm not so confident about is Google appearing to prowl around like a stalker, snapping photos of me while I'm bending over the begonias or picking up the dogs' latest expression of intestinal relief. I have seen the Great Aggregator traipse through here twice, quietly, snapping pictures like a tourist on a two-day trip through 10 cities, and leaving me to wonder whether the photographer got my good side.
But then I go back to what I was doing, unabashed and accepting of the scratch Google just made on the patina of my privacy. I mean, it's not as though Google knocked on my front door and asked if I wore matching socks.
However, I also accept that not everyone takes Google's passing picture-taking with similar grace and indifference. For some people, the sight of themselves or their property in a satellite photo via Google Street View compares to getting caught with their pants around their ankles. They didn't ask to have their picture taken and nobody sought their permission, and so they rail against the slightly surreptitious photography as if the camera operators performed an invasive procedure with the snap of a shutter — like removing a person's spleen without first asking the patient to sign a waiver.
Besides, there's an ethereal sense of presence borne by seeing the results of one's personal space captured by satellite — the creation of a connection that our innate sense of individuality needs time and attuned perspective to process.
This is why an offhanded statement by Google CEO Eric Schmidt this week rubbed all these concerned citizens the wrong way. On CNN's "Parker Spitzer" show Monday, he suggested, with humorous intent, these people "just move" after his company comes through with their Street View cameras. He insisted the shooters pass through neighborhoods once only, that this is not a "monitoring situation," thus making it impossible for Google to track comings and goings from homes and businesses and perhaps allaying the concern voiced by CNN's Kathleen Parker that Google can show others when her car is parked in front of her house.
"They cannot" see that, Schmidt told Parker. "The (image) resolution does not allow it."
In fact, it does, as my own experience demonstrates. After Schmidt spoke, I reviewed Google's visual accounting of my own house, and my car shown parked in front. The photos depicted the same blue car I have driven for years, and though apparent care was taken to distort the image just over my license plates I had no problem making out the bag of groceries sitting in the passenger's seat. Google's Street View shutterbugs passed by that day as I was unloading from a trip to the supermarket.
As for Schmidt's insistence that Google makes just one pass, a screen capture I grabbed about one year ago from the result of a previous Street View photograph proves otherwise. In that image, my other car is on display, and there is evidence for everyone including my mother to see that my yard can indeed look better than it does right now.
If I were I on the lam, or if I knew for certain that my mother had been checking the condition of my yard, this revelation might unnerve me. To a lesser extent, I feel uneasy regarding Google's ability to put faces with places, or connect real with virtual addresses and read license plates, unlike anything we have seen in public record-keeping to date.
In Germany, this ability has fostered outrage and prompted more than 200,000 citizens, or about 2 percent of the total population, to request their places of home and work be obscured ahead of Street View's debut in that country, where history has cultivated a delicate sense of individuality that's difficult to comprehend among self-aggrandizing cultures.
Schmidt told CNN his company acts responsibly at all times with the information at its disposal, but that's not what worries me. The people unaffiliated with Google who view the same photos cannot all be similarly responsible. And that kind of makes me want to just move.
