
Privacy Implications for OpenStreetView - GammaDelta
https://karp.id.au/a/2016/08/23/privacy-implications-for-openstreetview/
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jMyles
Reading into the details of these kinds of "privacy implications"
(particularly the desire to force publication delay and the force blurring of
people or license plates), I'm left thinking that the "implications" are more
stark for _freedom_ than they are for _privacy_.

Are there really privacy implications of _any_ sort in publishing a series of
photos of people and cars on a street that aren't already implicated by the
knowledge that Google and / or the NSA already have far better photos of the
same scenes?

On a more fundamental level: isn't publishing, in real time and high quality,
a photo (or series of photos) of a public area essentially for freedom of the
press? And doesn't the insertion of a "privacy" claim that threaten that
freedom?

I know it's specifically enshrined in the US Constitution, but in an age of
ubiquitous cameras and publication media, it's equally important in Australia
and around the world, no?

We can opt either to allow each other to share our eyes and ears unto
infinity, putting criminals and power brokers on notice that their actions in
public are preserved for all time, or we can decide to close and cover them,
leaving only criminals and power brokers to see and hear.

~~~
Symbiote
> We can opt either ... or

Or, we can have a compromise, since the world isn't black and white, and we
needn't restrict ourselves to a binary choice.

That's how the European rights work, on life, expression (speech), privacy and
so on.

~~~
jMyles
With most things, I agree, but I'm not sure I see any middle ground here. Can
you publish a picture taken in public, even if it includes faces and license
plates, or not? This does seem binary to me.

~~~
xyzzy123
Big public projects can have policies which minimise negative externalities.

You can still privately publish any photo you like, within the bounds of the
law.

There is lots of middle ground. "Legally you can, but morally, should you?"

Time series get interesting.

If it comes to actual law and courts, it's definitely context dependent.
Intent matters a lot. Surf cam is more OK than "revenge cam" of ex's house.
Yes that means humans ascribe morality to certain arrangements of bits (and
how the bits are evaluated is affected by who they were created by, and why).
No, publishing and freedom of speech are not absolute but depend on purpose
and intent.

To put it another way, technically child pornography is just a time series of
pictures right?

~~~
jMyles
> child pornography is just a time series of pictures right?

But presumably it's not the capturing of the photons that is criminal in the
case of child pornography. Even if you used a fake camera, it's still illegal,
right?

~~~
colejohnson66
I'd assume that's just child exploitation/molestation, not pornography. But
that's just me.

~~~
jMyles
Right right.

Well, then, I suppose what I'm saying is: in an information-age society, it's
the child exploitation/molestation that's properly a crime; capturing the same
as a piece of media is no modifier.

~~~
xyzzy123
But the media itself is illegal to posess. Some images / videos are Ok, some
are not. Moral judgement is involved.

What I am saying is, if society wants to, it can totally declare that some
pictures / videos are ok and some are not. This already happens all the time.

~~~
jMyles
Maybe that's not really OK anymore. I tend to be of the belief that, for
freedom to prevail in the information age, information freedom must be
absolute.

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MarkEthan
The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize.

As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash.
As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper &
start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from
the street will just become less private over time.

~~~
cuu508
And quality blurring may be tricky to implement. On Google Street View, street
name plates and road signs are often blurred, because the algorithm is not
sure if they are licence plates or not, and blurs too much. For Open Street
View, this would defeat the purpose of having the photos.

~~~
jforberg
"Because it's hard" is not a very good reason to neglect doing something when
you know it's the right thing to do.

The right thing to do would have been to avoid publishing these photos until
you have the means to anonymise them properly, or to use a service like Google
Vision and pay the small fee to get someone else to do it.

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m-jones
Cock-up before conspiracy.

OpenStreetView isn't intended to intrude, it is just naivety on the creators
part. It will be solved in some capacity sooner or later, if not for genuine
concern for peoples privacy, to avoid negative media attention.

~~~
icebraining
I think that's a fair assessment, but still, it's important to raise the issue
sooner rather than later.

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upofadown
Shouldn't it be possible to let people do their own blurring for the case
where the automatic stuff doesn't work?

There isn't going to be that much to blur if this is all straight ahead views
from a car. You don't see many people on the road from lower than car roof
level. Those on the sidewalks will be pretty far away. The issue with Google
is that the point of view is deliberately made high enough to clear cars in
other lanes. So in practice the privacy thing might not a huge issue here
unless a significant number of people start mounting cameras on poles.

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moron4hire
Perhaps we could consider what is going on here to be something of a small-
townification of cities.

I grew up in a small town. If something was going on out from behind closed
doors, everyone knew about it. And sometimes they knew even if it _was_ behind
closed doors.

Prior to the current era of data ubiquity, to escape such a thing, you could
find some level of anonymity in a crowd. Walking through Times Square in NYC,
you're technically in public, but you're just another unremarkable person on
an unremarkable day.

There is a certain level of ignorance about the greater world in a small town.
I've witnessed people saying and doing very--how should I say--unprogressive
things, "just" because they didn't know any better [0]. On the flip side,
there is a certain level of indifference about the greater world in a city.
I've seen no greater degree of true open-mindedness in cities, and I think
that's due to a kind of shutting down and retreating from the full ocean of
people that cities contain.

In other words, whether or not a certain person lives a public-by-default or
private-by-default life, they're probably going to be exactly the same.

So what does this mean for privacy? Privacy is a continuum that is inversely
correlated with how much contact you want to have with the outside world. 100%
privacy requires 100% retreat from the world, which is childishly unrealistic.
Either accept that society needs to know your face to be able to talk to you,
or go move out into the desert and live a hermit's life. You can't expect to
live in a community and be "anonymous", not now, not ever before.

I don't agree that one should be allowed to blur themselves out of other
people's photos. If you're out in public, you agree to be seen. It's childish
to say, "I don't want my photo online." You might as well say, "I don't want
people on the bus to see my face." They are the same exact people online as
they are on the bus.

[0] They should have known better, ignorance is no excuse here, but it's very
easy to rationalize to yourself that the media provides an accurate depiction
of people-unlike-you of whom you have no personal experience. I'm not sure my
grandfather has ever met an African American man who confirms his racist
stereotyping of them, but that doesn't stop him from adopting whole-cloth the
image that they are all wanna-be rap stars, which I blame mostly on my
grandfather being a raging asshole, but a small part on mainstream media
providing black men with few other roles.

~~~
sdoering
> If you're out in public, you agree to be seen.

True. Seen and enshrined in some (or more) peoples fleeting memory. Not
captured for (nearly) all eternity and the whole world (who were not present
at that exact moment and place) to see.

That is also the reason I oppose ubiquitous public surveillance. Even if it
can only be seen by some amount of government actors.

I am glad, that I grew up in a time without constant photography or
trackability. I am glad, that I an not totally recorded with every step I take
in public and that only the people who walk by might have the chance to
remember my face and me being there at that moment.

[Edit] formatting [/Edit]

~~~
moron4hire
That's not entirely true. Photographers have long had very broad rights about
shooting in public [0]. If you're in a high-traffic area, it's fairly likely
you could end up in someone's photo. You might be lost in the sea of people,
but you'll probably also be lost in the sea of mass data collection.

My point is not that "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to
fear". There is perhaps a corollary, "just who do you think you are that
anyone _would_ be interested in your life?" But even that is beside the point.
The point is that you've never actually had this extremely broad version of a
right to privacy that you think you had.

[0]
[http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf](http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf)

~~~
sdoering
I know of the rights a photographer has (at least here in Germany). It is not
so clear cut as it sounds. for example, if I wear a big pink hat in a sea of
suits and a photographer does make a photo of me within this sea, even being
among maybe hundreds of people, I am clearly the center of attention and he
has to obtain the right to use (and show) the image in any way.

You are right, if me being merely some pebble in a sea of pebbles - so to
speak.

So there is still some privacy implication left - even in your example.

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mastazi
How do you actually use openstreetview.org? All I could see was a map, no
imagery. At first some roads were highlighted in pink but as soon as I zoomed
and panned a little bit, the pink lines disappeared...

~~~
lorenzhs
It's under heavy load at the moment (probably some scaling issues), so
responses are a bit slow. You click on the pink lines (and wait).

~~~
sdoering
Even loading the pink lines took about 60 seconds last time I tried. So the
heavy load seems to be very heavy indeed.

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unicornporn
Funny, me and a friend started talking about a crowd sourced alternative to
Google Street View just last week. My first thought when discussing this was:
how will you normalize data? How will you provide a 360 view? I guess the
answer is: you probably wont.

Didn't know of this initiative, so I was happy to see people working on it.
Here's the first image that popped up for me:

[https://imgur.com/a/ScgOd](https://imgur.com/a/ScgOd)

Lo and behold, it's upside down. :)

~~~
maxerickson
They fixed that bug:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331769)

Mapillary has been able to recover 3d structure in areas with high photo
density:

[http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html](http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html)

That's still a long way from merging the photos into a coherent view, but you
quickly start to be able to 'look around'.

