BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
AMY EDDINGS:
And I'm Amy Eddings. This week, a watchdog group called Privacy International ranked Internet companies for their treatment of privacy rights. Last on the list, Google, a position reserved for companies that engage in, quote, "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy."

Most recently, Google has been criticized for a new mapping feature called Street View, a service that produces photographic 360-degree detailed images of every street in a few selected cities.

In the images you see buildings, license plates and people engaged in activities they may not want the whole world to see. Some Street View images have included a man scaling a security gate at a San Francisco home, female college students sunbathing and a man walking into an adult bookstore.

The images are not in real time, and they're captured in a pretty low-tech way, cameras mounted on the roofs of cars. What Google is doing with Street View is perfectly legal. They're public images, after all. But do we have any recourse to protect our privacy in public?

David Evans is the founder of Market Platform Dynamics. He says there are good and bad things about this new technology.
DAVID EVANS:
In some ways it's obviously very good. There are lots of reasons why we want to be able to look at what's going on in a street, to identify a store. Maybe we wanted to monitor whether our house is on fire or to monitor whether something bad is happening in our neighborhood. So there are all sort of good reasons why it makes sense to collect these data and to make them available to people.

At the same time, there's a cost to that, and the cost that we all bear is that things that we used to think about as being private are potentially being made available on the Internet for others to see.
AMY EDDINGS:
But how is it that we come to think that what we do on the street, in public, is private? If I'm smoking a cigarette on the street, is that a private act?
DAVID EVANS:
Here's the deal: In a legal sense, smoking on the street or walking on the street where we can all be seen by other people, obviously, isn't private. Having said that, expectations that we used to have concerning our privacy no longer hold.

And one of the issues that we need to think about as a society is whether we want the laws that protect our privacy, in effect, the line that society has drawn in the past, to change in order to reflect the new technologies that alter those expectations that we've all had.
AMY EDDINGS:
Another free service besides Street View that Google offers is, of course, its search engine and Gmail. That email service has been the source of much criticism from those concerned with privacy. Why is that?
DAVID EVANS:
All of your Gmails are sitting on a server and they're sitting there for a long time, and there's a technology out there that's, in effect, looking at them constantly to make it easier for Google to target advertising to people that are using Gmail.

There's a second reason, and this is one of the reasons why Google has performed so poorly in the Privacy International ranking. Every time you engage in a search using Google, Google is tracking and storing all of the searches that you've done. And Google doesn't do any of that because they're really interested in invading your privacy or finding out whether you've gone to adult websites, for example, or whether you've said something that's confidential that they might benefit from. They're not interested in that.

They're ultimately interested in the data so they can do advertising more effectively. But one of the costs to people of that is that they're giving something up to Google.
AMY EDDINGS:
If I engage in that transaction, if I sign up for Gmail and know what I'm getting myself into, isn't that perfectly allowable?
DAVID EVANS:
Yeah, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. As long as you know the bargain that you're entering into with Google, I don't think there's anything problematic from a public policy standpoint, at all.
AMY EDDINGS:
And that's part of the problem with Google Street View, isn't it, that you don't know that you're, quote, unquote, "signing up" for this? You don't know that your image was captured, by a Google employee, of you sitting on your front stoop when they took a photograph of your house?
DAVID EVANS:
That's exactly right. In the case of Street View, Google is taking information that, again, whether legally or not, we all expect it to be private, and has taken it from us.
AMY EDDINGS:
Street View-type photographs are taken and viewed by governments all the time. How is it different when a private company is taking and storing our images?
DAVID EVANS:
Yeah, that's a very interesting question, and it reminds me that one of the things we all learned after the train bombings in London in 2005 is that the City of London had these security cameras all over the place that were constantly monitoring street traffic.

So you're absolutely right. There are lots of ways, including when we go to the ATM machine, where our pictures are taken and stored for some period of time.

There's a fundamental difference though, and the difference is the Internet. The City of London doesn't make the pictures that it takes from security cameras available in real time or stores them on an Internet site where anyone, anywhere around the world can go to.

And there's another difference, and that's the incentive. The City of London or the City of New York doesn't really have any incentive to take any of the pictures that they've taken from security cameras and make them available to people - no reason to do that.

Google, on the other hand, has financial incentives to take any information that it has and make it widely available in order to generate traffic.
AMY EDDINGS:
David Evans, thanks for joining us.
DAVID EVANS:
Thank you very much for having me.
AMY EDDINGS:
David Evans is the founder of Market Platform Dynamics and coauthor of Catalyst Code: The Secrets Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies.