The privacy implications of databases

Google Street View has had problems with being accepted in several countries. In Germany Google gave up for now after people requested that their houses be blurred. In Switzerland Google is now shooting images after some modifications and restrictions were agreed upon.

But one thing that you always find on the Internet is people expressing how they don’t get that someone might be upset about Google Street View. After all it only shows things that are already public. The problem is of course, that there are different scales of how publicly something is known about you. And if someone puts information about me in a searchable database on the internet, that’s very public.

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