This is an interesting effort from a friend of mine. If successful, it will go down as one of the greatest true hacks (true hack = an inventive and public technical feat, not necessarily computer-related) of all time. Anyone can participate, even people with very little computer knowledge - and the result may be socially beneficial.
My friend asks:
"Who gave Google the right to web publish photographs of my backyard so detailed that you can see the details of my landscaping? Or which side of the driveway I park my car on?....I am proposing a two pronged approach; establish that Google/Keyhole has the capability to modify individual images on request, and also create a legal requirement for them to do so. These are concurrent activities, and the first one begins today.
I hereby offer a $500 US Dollar reward...
...to the person who accomplishes the following, and can prove it:
- Create a logo for either MSN Search or Yahoo! large enough to be visible from space.
- Place this logo in the path of one of the image gathering satellites
- Submit before and after URLs from GoogleEarth showing the logo on the image, in the GoogleEarth system
Once the GoogleEarth image bank contains enough ads for Google's competitors then Google will have to find a way to identify and alter images. Once that capability is in place we can demand it be used to preserve our individual privacy."
Why I Like This Idea
On the whole, I think this hack is a worthwhile effort. Even though some of the things my friend has said on EarthHack.NET are overly alarmist, the danger is real. It just comes from other potential sources.
As a recent Winds article noted, commercial and non-military surveying satellites are indeed approaching dual-use resolutions of 2.5 - 1.0 meters. Still, there aren't that many of them, and even with improving technology this will remain very technically challenging for several years.
If Google is claiming better than 1-meter resolution (and they are) for major cities, it's almost certainly not coming from satellites. I suspect it's mostly from planes etc. doing geographic surveying.
While I don't see an explosion of space-based surveillance for the reasons noted above (few platforms + technical difficulty + high cost = inability to provide that level of coverage), I have seen enough proposals for deploying broadband et. al. via aerostats, blimps, and high-altitude endurance aircraft to realize that the future my friend describes is not impossible at all. Imaging equipment that could also offer frequent surveying updates at 2.5-1 meter resolution or better would be a logical addition to those platforms and business models.
So check out EarthHack.NET - and decide!
If You Decide to Play
On to the technical advice. Let's start with the size implications, if you decide to participate.
If you're in an urban area likely to be surveyed at 1-meter or less resolution, you probably need something about 3 car-lengths x 3 car-widths to make a short word like "MSN" or "Yahoo!" visible (readers, feel free to correct me here). Rural areas are more likely to be surveyed at 2.5-5 meter resolution, which means you start to get into small local park-size baseball diamond dimensions in order to be sure (again, this is a guesstimate - readers, feel free to correct).
Now the time-period implications.
Because their schedules and routes are much less fixed, plane-based photos are good and bad news. Bad news because they have no predictability like satellites. Good news in that they up the odds that any given location will be surveyed and uploaded. No doubt an inventive person can also think of ways to get their land surveyed and uploaded sooner than that, using clever cooperation and/or publicity efforts.
Some Free Advice for Google
Get smart. Get out ahead of this one. Start deploying some of your technical brainpower to figure out how to address these concerns.
In the end, you'll have to offer privacy-related protections. As the update periods shrink, as they will, concern will grow - and people are rightfully very touchy about this stuff. Make it easy on yourselves, rather than a hard, rushed exercise following serious brand damage. Which Microsoft would certainly exploit.
If people choose to participate on their property, that's entirely their business. And if people choose to promote voluntary, peaceful, legal acitivities - that is likewise their business.
If Google makes the frequent corporate mistake of trying legal steps, it must assert directly or indirectly that what people do on their own property is somehow subject to its approval. This would decisively confirmed all of my friend's worst fears about Google and its service - and thereby turn those concerns into a issue worthy of sustained coverage and promotion.
Other firms have made this mistake, and paid dearly. I've always believed Gogle was smarter than that. I guess we'll see.
Publish pix of houses of Google execs.
Interestingly, I am inside city limits and have a large open space which I am about to mow. Hmmmm. Does Google update its footage from satellite on a regular basis? I have seen photos of my place taken several years ago from satellite.
If you will look at a Google Map of Washington, D.C. and zoom on the capitol and White House, you will see that the technology already exists to blur selected areas. Why go to all the bother to erect landmark logos?
The problem is getting Google to apply blurring at the request of private citizens as well as government.
This idea freaks me out a little.
Link
Get over it. Advanced technology means no privacy. There will soon be cheap, flying cameras the size of insects with wireless connections to the Internet. Society will adjust.
Google makes information easier to find. That is Google�s business plan.
Blurring? The government has their own, better satellites. They can watch with higher resolution and in real time. Smile.
Who gave Google the right to web publish photographs of my backyard so detailed that you can see the details of my landscaping? Or which side of the driveway I park my car on?
I think this is silly. Who gave EarthHack the right to censor what has been freely available since the invention of the camera and the airplane? Even Earth Hack admits as much:
Yes, I know these photos have been available for a long time from Keyhole, and Yes, I know that they currently don't need my permission to publish these images. But at what point should we collectively be able to assert control over these images?
The answer is that at no point can anyone assert control over something that has always been public. And I frankly shudder at the socialist implications of the "we collectively".
What EarthHack proposes as a solution is even more silly and childish. It presupposes that the chance at a $500 prize will inspire (collectively, no doubt) the multitudes to rise up and join EarthHack in his quixotic assault on the evil corporation--Google. And that Google will take a particular course of action as a result of his campaign. If I were Google, I would simply offer $1,000 to anyone who put a Google ad in their backyard visible from space.
This reminds me of the Barbra Streisand lawsuit against the California Coastal Records Project to stop them from showing a picture of the coastal bluff where her house is located. Really, if people like EarthHack and Barbra Streisand got their way, plane travel would be banned because you might be able to catch a glimpse of their patio furniture.
Extremists of any stripe discredit the cause they espouse, and EarthHack is a discredit to the privacy rights movement.
This is sillyness. You do not have ownership over pictures of your house. Period. As Fly points out, the increasing ubiquity of surveilance technology makes this sort of thing a futile gesture. This information already exists; Google just makes it easier to obtain. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
I highly reccommend David Brin's The Transparent Society. Privacy is not the real issue; the real issue is lopsided power that comes from lopsided access to information. Brin makes the case that rather than futilely wasting effort trying to stem the tide of omnipresent surveilance technology, we should move in the direction of "mutually assured surveillance," where everyone is capable of getting information about everyone else. Google Earth fits right into this theme, and I like it.
Ah... But Google will accept and process requests to remove web pages from its index. That is a precedent that opens its doors to blur-on-request.
And the idea that one can't print something obnoxious or commercial on one's own cornfield (or whatever) is equally repugnant, if not ludicrous, no?
Brin's Transparent Society has many points. While I differ with his stated position on encryption, there is a problem with things as they stand today that is just a bit complicated. The "Shooting Back" crowd ("hey, if Fry's get to film me, why don't I get to film them?) have my sympathy. But people who are trying to guard subways, etc., are trying to make the case that taking pix of such facilities ought to be restricted since they won't be able to keep the pix from being taken by bad guys looking for ways to hit soft spots in targets.
As Stephenson said, the future has arrived, it just isn't evenly distributed. Brin didn't want a monopoly on info, and he didn't want only the Authorities to have the info. Google as portal is suspect, because it has oracular value in the minds of its users.
THAT is the core risk, IMNSHO.
Nort
I used the word "collectively" to represent a shared interest. I could have used more poetic language that did not conjure up visions of Barb Streisand, but "we, the people" has already been used by someone else.
"Collectively" denotes no political stripe or bent. And given what Mr. Katzman knows of my background I am sure he is ROFL at the thought of me as a pro-collective agitator.
Aerial surveillance of my neighborhood is not a big deal at low resolution or high altitude – this I know and do not object to. But as the resolution and frequency increases, and access to that data expands exponentially, it becomes possible for the very existence of the data to preclude someone claiming to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his own yard. The existing concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy" as established in US legal precedent requires the individual whose privacy was violated to prove that the situation was one where there was a reasonable expectation. In other words, the onus is on the “victim”.
Low resolution, high altitude shots don’t invade my privacy – high resolution, low altitude shots do, and there is therefore a significant difference under the law.
I do not object to the government snooping on me from space/aircraft, as they have the burden of getting a warrant before they do so. But if “GoogleEarth” and similar technology is not limited in the amount of data it can share without permission then your backyard ceases to be a place where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy; based on that change, a warrant may no longer be needed by any government body to watch you in your yard. That is my concern, and it is one that is shared by a few Texans in Congress so it appears we will be getting somewhere with this in the legal arena also.
Loss of privacy is an exercise in incrementalism, defending is too.
Anyways, always love the debate and any further ideas and perspectives would be welcome.
Oh yeah - about the $500 for the Yahoo logo - Google told me they will not alter the images expect when requested to for security reasons.
I thought the Yahoo logo stunt would be a fun and cheap way to prove them wrong, nothing more.
I know losts of people here in Texas who have enough pasture land to mow a full haiku visible from space, let alone a Yahoo logo. I'll admit you city-folk will have a bit harded time with it. :-P
We watch your experiment with great interest. "Transparency for the correct people" is tricky business. I will remark that it is not uncommon for The Authorities to produce effective news blackouts when it suits them, even going so far as to jam cell phones in order to better "control the situation". Playing tape recordings of slowly-killed rabbits is optional. Hey, I'd have paid iTunes for that, just to use in a Waco Mash-Up CD project. Hmm, where's that FOIA request form...? FOLA... FIJA... Ah! here it is! (Hums to self as he fills it out...)
A tangentially-related irony in recent US history is that privacy, though nowhere enumerated in the Constitution, is probably a right (see the 9th Amendment) -- but the power to terminate a fetus has nothing whatsoever to do with privacy; it's a chattel or property right, or it's no right at all. The Supremes tried to be Solomonic. But Solomon, like Socrates, never lost, did he? Or so said their amanuenses.
"Absolute Truth? What's That?"
"A five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court."
-- Dan O'Neill's Odd Bodkins
A quick technical correction - commercial satellites have already passed the one-meter resolution limit. If I recall, much of Google's imagery comes from the commercial imagery supplier Digital Globe. Digital Globe will happily sell you, as part of their "Standard Imagery" product, natural-color images with a resolution of 70 centimeters.
For comparison, a quick Google search reveals that aerial tax photographs are available freely online at 6 inch (15 centimeter) resolution. It is likely that the original tax assessment photos are actually at a higher resolution, and that what is posted online are merely scans of the photo negatives.
This will certainly affect any attempt to insert ads into Google's imagery. Your best bet would be to live in a densely populated area where Google hasn't purchased high-resolution imagery yet, and to hope that whatever imagery Google purchases is the most recent available. Worrying about aircraft surveying patterns is probably senseless - instead, look up the orbital paths of Digital Globe's satellites.
As to how this affects the validity of the EarthHack argument, there are two ways of looking at this issue. On the one hand, Google Earth is not making use of low-altitude, high-resolution photography - rather, they are using space-based 0.7 meter photography. On the other hand, the author of "EarthHack" is misinformed when he worries that photographs might eventually be "able to find the grill in my backyard." At six-inch resolution or better, this is entirely possible from existing tax assessment photographs. With respect to imaging capabilities, either the author is several years ahead of his time or he is several decades behind it.
Reallyreallyreally silly.
GIS companies (both foreign and US) have been selling sat dat and overflys forever--have they ever asked your permission to shoot your property? Nope.
Are you going to go to all those companies and make them blurr you?
bonne chance.
and the guvvies have imagery in multiple sensors at resolutions that would make you drool--what EarthHack gonna do about that?
I do not object to the government snooping on me from space/aircraft, as they have the burden of getting a warrant before they do so.
Maybe you don't object, but if this becomes legislature don't you think it will be exploited in the most damaging fashion possible?
And why rag on google when tax assessors and GIS companies have high rez stuff they disseminate all the time?
What if there is say, a forest fire or flood in my neighborhood--do we have to get your permission to display your house for the forest service flyovers? What about arial police chases?
ugh.
just what we need, more laws.
One more thing, and i'll shut up. In the late '90s NASA did overflys with a multispectral sensor called AVIRIS-- i can tell a LOT about your house in IR. GIS companies fly multispectral too. Some GIS companies fly SAR.
I think EarthHack hasn't thought this thru.
In a country with a tightly regulated real estate market such as Spain, civil servors are using GoogleEarth directly from their office computer and pictures taken from commercial imaging satellites to identify not approved construction sites and house enlargments without license. People has begun to use camuflage nets to cover their new rooms in the backyard, but further developments in IR cameras and SAR may sharpen Big Brother's eye making them useless.
Did not the US develop a missile able to knock down satellites in Low Earth Orbit?
Real Earth Hack: weaving my crepe myrtle branches into a living tea-seat for my wife.
Earth Hack (-ing up a hairball): getting an ulcer over somebody far away being able to see the same information that anybody standing in the street or easement can already see, or that is part of public record due to zoning regs.
If people want to defend privacy, rather than engage in pointless anticorporate stunts, how about lobbying to repeal/overturn the ubiquity of residential zoning laws which make privacy a laughingstock in the first place?
(BA, your friendly neighborhood fairly radical libertarian)
earthhack, so so sorry--but boxing alcibiades is correct-- if you want to preserve your privacy at that granularity, you will have to target collection, not publishing.
If you don't want people to see your house, build underground. heh. but don't forget the ground penetrating radar. build deep. ;-)
An hour ago I didn't have the slightest clue as to the identity of the page author and didn't care either. But on a lark, I ran a whois search on the domain name and found out his name, address and phone number. Furthermore, I easily found his family website. Now here's where I call bullshit: if you willingly publish pictures of your children up on the internet, isn't it a little bit disingenuous to feign indignation at Google allowing people to look at the top of your house when you are clearly not taking any steps to maintain your own privacy?