Google Invades Our Driveways!

Apparently Google employees, and their camera trucks, are now driving street by street photographing America's neighborhoods in service of their Google Street-View mapping feature.  And not only do they drive down the street, they'll drive up your driveway up to your basketball net and trampoline as well if you don't watch out.  At least, that's what the Google Team did to Aaron and Christine Boring of Pittsburgh, PA.  Those close up photos then appeared on Google...until the Boring's sued.  Perhaps this was a one-off mistake made by an individual employee - that is always possible, as I commented yesterday.  But maybe that really is Google's aspiration.

I'm sure that America's Realtors are pleased that Google is making real estate so visible to possible consumers.  And I'm sure that lots of people will have fun driving through a city neighborhood without ever having to leave their Barcalounger.  But like the Borings, I personally would rather decide whether Google - or anyone else - comes onto my property line to take snap pictures.

We're used to worrying about governmental snooping - and the Fourth Amendment provides at least limited protection from state actors (the operative word being "limited") - but when Google decides to do an inch by inch survey of America, high powered cameras and all, privacy becomes very thin.  And once privacy is thin, the government will argue that the Fourth Amendment no longer provides as much security against state intrustions - since our "reasonable expectations of privacy" will be diminished as well.   Harry Surden argues, in his piece Structural Rights in Privacy, that we depend on transaction costs to inhibit legal, but undesirable, privacy invasions.  In Google, we have a company willing to invest more money than the government in data aggregation.  And with fewer structural constraints. 

How will this information be used?  Hard to say.  But it's easy to imagine an employer, looking for heuristics to assess candidates, taking a look at the residence of a prospective employee.  Insurers and others might do the same.  One thing is sure: Google will harvest serious profits from this material. 

Comments

[John Castiglione]

You bring up an extremely salient point in regards to current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence - privacy is an inherently weak value upon which to place the entirety of our Fourth Amendment protections. Over the last 3 or 4 decades (give or take) privacy has emerged as the sole counterbalance to the government's "law enforcement" prerogatives, broadly defined, and so when a court is faced with the ultimate question when determining the reasonableness of a search or seizure - is the privacy interest at stake here outweighed the legitimate law enforcement/government interests identified by the state - the answer is increasingly yes, partially for the reasons you mention.

Shameless plug - I have a paper posted at SSRN discussing ways to enhance Fourth Amendment protections using values other than privacy. In my paper, I aruge that human dignity is one such value, and does not fall victim to many of the "weakening factors" that privacy has gradually fallen victim to, as your post discusses. Check it out if you are interested: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1028072