Reversing the Google Car

May 15th 2010

2010-05-15T05:21:00.000-07:00

Google like any large organisation are not in full control of their employees, if you believe their claim that sampling public wifi broadcasts with their Google Car was a complete mistake.

Apparently since 2006 the experimental code has been incorporated into vehicle software. Interestingly in all that time it only came to light because German authorities asked to audit the vehicles data. Though proof Google didn't know about this will be impossible to prove many will take this as complicity in yet another invasion of personal privacy. At the end of this following BBC report, why would Googel want to position people by using their wifi signals?. What was that research about ?,and who sanctioned it? - this must have appealed to someone at some point within Google who could have take a view on its wider implications but failed to,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8684110.stm

AndalOcio - CÓRDOBA SE VISTE DE AZUL POR EL DÍA DE EUROPA

2010-05-04T02:55:00.000-07:00

AndalOcio - CÓRDOBA SE VISTE DE AZUL POR EL DÍA DE EUROPA

18th Jan 2010 Janet Chan: Police Cellphone Recordings from Roger Clarke

2010-02-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

Hi Glenn – something for your RGC project...Janet
=====

From the email list Surveillance, it was posted by Roger Clarke, http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Police fight cellphone recordings
Daniel Rowinski, New England Center For Investigative Reporting / Jan 12, 2010 Boston.com (15 January 2010)
http://mobile.boston.com/art/21//news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/?single=1

http://mobile.boston.com/art/21/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/?single=1
http://snipurl.com/u30fs

Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager's mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.

Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.

"One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,'' Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, "my phone was seized, and I was arrested.''

The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.

Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.

Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.

There are no hard statistics for video recording arrests. But the experiences of Surmacz and Glik highlight what civil libertarians call a troubling misuse of the state's wiretapping law to stifle the kind of street-level oversight that cellphone and video technology make possible.

"The police apparently do not want witnesses to what they do in public,'' said Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who helped to get the criminal charges against Surmacz dismissed.

Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected the notion that police are abusing the law to block citizen oversight, saying the department trains officers about the wiretap law. "If an individual is inappropriately interfering with an arrest that could cause harm to an officer or another individual, an officer's primary responsibility is to ensure the safety of the situation,'' she said.

In 1968, Massachusetts became a "two-party'' consent state, one of 12 currently in the country. Two-party consent means that all parties to a conversation must agree to be recorded on a telephone or other
audio device; otherwise, the recording of conversation is illegal. The law, intended to protect the privacy rights of individuals, appears to have been triggered by a series of high-profile cases involving private detectives who were recording people without their
consent.

In arresting people such as Glik and Surmacz, police are saying that they have not consented to being recorded, that their privacy rights have therefore been violated, and that the citizen action was
criminal.

"The statute has been misconstrued by Boston police,'' said June Jensen, the lawyer who represented Glik and succeeded in getting his charges dismissed. The law, she said, does not prohibit public recording of anyone. "You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want; you can do that.''

Ever since the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 was videotaped, and with the advent of media-sharing websites like Facebook and YouTube, the practice of openly recording police activity has become commonplace. But in Massachusetts and other states, the arrests of street videographers, whether they use cellphones or other video technology, offers a dramatic illustration of the collision between new technology and policing practices.

"Police are not used to ceding power, and these tools are forcing them to cede power,'' said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Ardia said the proliferation of cellphone and other technology has equipped people to record actions in public. "As a society, we should be asking ourselves whether we want to make that into a criminal activity,'' he said.

[snip -- goes on about other cases and outcomes in other states]

Positive Uses of Surveillance

2009-10-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

Are we over-reacting to the Google Car? To anyone travelling to a strange country or part of town, it is reassuring to be able to find the destination on the map, get the direction on how to get there, and have a preliminary glimpse of what the neighbourhood looks like. We all benefit from this free service (or shall we call it survice?) We all want more information, more detailed information, and more up-to-date information. Is it any wonder that Google Map is alive and well, in spite of the occasional protests and resistance?
As Benoit Dupont points out in his chapter 'Hacking the Panopticon' in Matheieu Deflem's book Surveillance and Governance: Crime Controal and Beyond, the Internet has democratized surveillance and allowed 'marginalized groups to deploy sophisticated surveillance technologies against the state and large corporations'. He cited Amnesty International's campaign 'Eyes on Darfur' as an example where violence and genocide can be monitored and exposed by this 'global neighbourhood watch'.
Dupont also highlights the resistance strategies that Internet users have adopted to block and mask their activities. He refers to the paper by Gary Marx, 'A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance' which outlines eleven such moves:

The 11 prominent types of response to privacy-invading surveillance are: 1) discovery moves, 2) avoidance moves, 3) piggy-backing moves, 4) switching moves, 5) distorting moves, 6) blocking moves, 7) masking (identification) moves, 8) breaking moves, 9) refusal moves, 10) cooperative moves, and 11) counter-surveillance moves.
One move not mentioned by Marx is the work of artists who make surveillance the subject of their research and creative work. There is a growing list of such artists, see Ctrl [Space] Rhetorics of Surveillance: From Bentham to Big Brother, and many others.

Different Maps

2009-10-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

Suppose for a moment that the GoogleCar is a bit like a probe-head, scanning a surface. What you get is, at one level (that of a user employing the standard interface) a map composed of "tubes" (Glenn's image) whose interior is covered with stitched-together images. But if you pull back, and abstract from this, you get other maps. For example, the map featured on the Street View wikipedia page, which shows (in terms of countries visited) where the Car has been (dark blue) is planning to go (light blue) and is not currently "interested in".

There you get a map of "commercial interest", or a map of "security issues", or however you'd prefer to frame it. But suppose you were to focus on the UK for a moment, and you produced a reasonably high resolution map of the country showing places GoogleCar had been to and had not been to, and showing (via colour coding) the reason for its not having gone there. Suppose you allowed one colour (grey, as per the above map) for places which GoogleCar is not currently particularly drawn to... but used other colours to symbolise the reasons why GoogleCar has been actively excluded from going to a given location? For example, government installations are black, gated communities are red, private roads yellow, places like Broughton, Bucks that relied on force majeure to keep the Car at bay are a violent purple, and so on...

So, you'd end up with a "scanned" image like a thermogram, but registering, rather than temperature, but variations in effective privacy in the UK (or whatever country you choose)...

2009-10-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Howabout a Google Ear, rather than a Google Car? I imagine an enormous ear driving round, picking up all the noises and conversations, all the interactions that constitute our everyday life. Just an intrusive maybe, but more true to the complex, temporal nature of our existence. To some extent Thomson and Craighead have done something on these lines in their short film Flat Earth. If you click here you will get the essay I wrote for Animate, the commissioning agency, about Flat Earth. In the film blog entries are juxtaposed with zooms onto a Google Earth style representation of the globe. T + C's film reminds us that the spaces represented by Google Earth are filled with people with complex interior lives and desires.

From Rob Owen - Google Car reminds me...

2009-10-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

The reversal of the Google Car is an interesting debating point; and my first reaction was "what does it matter?" Who cares if the camera on wheels comes whizzing down the road scooping up images and depositing them into some far off virtual space. Except of course, that far-off space is rather close and infact only a few clicks away for anyone who wants to see it, but who would want to?

A few months ago I did catch a glimpse of the said vehicle trundling down through our rural village - but I can't say I was compelled to look up the results on a webiste. I know what our house looks like. I know what the street looks like. Why would I want to see it on screen? Maps from the air are different of course, and when we bought our house over a year ago, one of the first thing we did was have a look at Google Maps - and yes there it was: our house, complete with garden, greenhouse and extensive tree vegetation.

We even looked at it a few months later and blow me - the image had changed! It was now our car in the drive - and not that of the previous owner. The image had been updated and of course no-one told us. There was no postcard from those nice men and women at Google saying,'oh by the way we've had a bit of a fly through and now you'll be glad to know that we've got the very latest image of your lovely rural dwelling - nice bit of gardening by the way.' Nope - none of that. So something's going on. There's somebody, somewhere gathering lots of images and data at ever increasing frequency. How soon before the images are collected and updated every month, every week..even daily? Is that what will happen if the Google car accelerates?

Our postman, Percy, delivers the letters at around 9.15 every morning and as part of the service he drops off the Sun newspaper to the house over the road. Whilst I was on holiday during the summer, I noticed that prior to popping the newspaper through the letter box, Percy would have a good gawp at Page Three. I must have been quite bored, because this daily ritual became a bit if a joke - as I hid behind the curtains waiting for Percy to park outside, leave the van running and walk upto next door - before defly having a sneaky look at a topless woman and then pushing the folded paper through the letter box. But once the Google car accelarates, I'll no doubt be able to see this little ritual on line!

The Google Car also got me thinking about how organisations collect data, with no apparent purpose. We are all now required to record our time in work. Our wonderful IT/Corporate Services dept. have decided that we need to know what everyone is doing. This is crucial information for managers. We've spent too long managing budgets and ignored managing the staff's time. Great, so far. Anyway, the new system gets introduced and it looks like the work we do as an organisation of 450 staff spread across 16 offices in Wales can be classified into 1645 different activities. Isn't that great to know! Then the system they devise sets out that we must record our time according to 15 min blocks. Now, not all members of staff will undertake all 1645 activties, obviously, but you can do the maths yourself..there are 30, 15 min blocks in each 7hr 30 min days...so 450 staff x 1645 activities x 30 time units/day...that's one heck of a lot of data each day of the year! And for what? Here's the shocker, once that data is collected, hardly anyone looks at it. Seriously! You might look at your own time sheet, if you had nothing to do; or if you had even more time and you were bored, ala Percy-watching, you might have a sneaky look at how someone else is spending their time. But for the most part you wouldn't ever glance at it ever again. So what's this all about? Maybe it's the same phenomenum as the Google Car..ie colleceting endless data that has no real meaning?

Meanwhile life goes on. There's a 'which is the tail and which is the dog issue' here. We seem to collect data because we can - but there's hardly any apparent use for it. Did we have a debate in society and decide that what we need is endless images of every street in Britain, so that we can all see where everyone else lives? Perhaps I missed that one. Maybe there was an announcement over the summer and I was too busy looking through the curtains to catch a glimpse of Percy. Damn! I've missed something again! That just goes to show that you've always got to be plugged into the system. Keeping an eye out for the latest new thing. More e-mails that's what we need! I only had 143 in work yesterday, something's going wrong. I want information to flow my way in a faster and faster fashion. I was twitter and blogs (oops this is one, isn't it?) and I want to know what everyone, and I mean everyone, is doing at all times please. That should be easy.

Maybe the Google Car can't be slowed down. Maybe all this speeding up and data nonsense is the same thing. Maybe we're accelerating into the oblivion, getting closer and closer to the Sun (Percy was just a pioneer) until we all combust into a smouldering couldren of data - a mass of irrelvant information and facts. We're doomed Captain Mainwairing..we're doomed!

Maybe the only way to reverse the Google car is to let it accelerate. Just make sure you're not still on board.
You've been warned!"
I could rant further but I feel a pint calling me for some far distant pub! I'll be there for 1 hour and 45 minutes if anyone cares to know....
Cheers

Rob

Eyeborg from Janet Chan

2009-10-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

Anti-surveillance filmmaker plans eye-socket camera
Thu Mar 5, 2009 9:52am EST

BRUSSELS, March 5 (Reuters) - A Canadian filmmaker plans to have a mini camera installed in his prosthetic eye to make documentaries and raise awareness about surveillance in society. Rob Spence, 36, who lost an eye in an accident as a teenager, said his so-called Project Eyeborg is to have the camera, a battery and a wireless transmitter mounted on a tiny circuit board. (www.eyeborgblog.com) Originally the whole idea was to do a documentary about surveillance. I thought I would become a sort of super hero ... fighting for justice against surveillance," Spence said. "In Toronto there are 12,000 cameras. But the strange thing I discovered was that people don't care about the surveillance cameras, they were more concerned about me and my secret camera eye because they feel that is a worse invasion of their privacy." Spence, in Brussels to appear at a media conference, said no part of the camera would be connected to his nerves or brain. He does not intend to create a reality TV show and the camera will be switched off when not needed, he said. "I don't want to go into a locker room. I don't want to show the world me going to the bathroom either ... I'm not a life-caster and I don't plan to be one," he said.

(Reporting by Bate Felix; Editing by Louise Ireland)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

Also a site on "paths of least surveillance" by the Institute of Applied Autonomy (IAA) http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html

Chris Groves - What does the Google Car want?

2009-10-08T06:15:00.000-07:00

We should perhaps assume (a la Robert Romanyshyn) that technologies are desires and social imaginaries that achieve expression through the use of techniques, and that as a result they’re heavy with futures.

With this in mind, there appears something almost archaic about Street View, particularly when compared with the immersive virtual environments that MMPORGs and other forms of networked gaming offer, including virtual presences which commit players to “taking responsibility for [their] own presence”, as Charlie put it.

Which is not to suggest that we should take a deflationary view of the Google Car – as per the oft-repeated Google line that Street View is primarily intended as a tool for people who want to buy a house.

On the contrary: I think we have to view the progress of the Car around (some parts of) the world as part of an assembly including GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth. This is why I found Charlie’s remark that the viewpoint adopted by the Car as that of “an almost angelic, dematerialised subject” very interesting. You could view the “imaginary” behind the whole mapping project which View, Maps and Earth constitute as converging towards a particular regulative ideal… How about this being (something like…) a GIS-based system that embodies a universal grammar of the human-inhabited earth, a structure in which myriad dimensions of official (and non-official, think of user layers in Earth) data concerning any given location can be accessed through an interface. And this would in principle give access too to all manner of ways of representing a location, or of relating it to other locations and their multilayered stories - what if you had a GPS-based system that “showed you where you were in all its literary and historical depth”?

So the fantasy, the driving, regulative ideal, would be a kind of philosophical language (a la Leibniz and the Encyclopedie), held together by the imagined viewpoint of a disembodied subject who is not part of Maps, View or Earth.

The huge gap between the map and the territory is of course immediately apparent; there is no real time mapping, there are private roads and government installations which are prevented from appearing on View, etc. etc.. Stitching it all together has a history, like edits on Wikipedia, a history of small acts by a team of embodied subjects. But this gap between fantasy and reality perhaps makes the desire more apparent – and sustains it...

UPDATE: There is, in fact, something of Zizek/Freud's Broken Kettle [PDF] about StreetView. All justifications for it are retroactive and unconvincing, partial ('it's for housebuyers', 'it's for nervous tourists' etc.). There's something exorbitant about it, something ridiculous. And the fact that it exists is perhaps best understood as a symptom of a complex fascination with and desire for disembodiment. Like wanting to be present at your own funeral; or to freeze time for everyone but yourself and run around doing all kinds of illict stuff... And so what draws people to it is its naughtiness, the pleasure of lurking?

2009-10-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

GOOGLEDEPRIVATION.COM/PLAINT

It must be a full year since Google's Bug-eyed Monster roared past my house, Calle Antonio Machado-1 in the rural village of Las Pinedas (pop. 197) some 25 minutes from the fomer Moorish capital of Cordoba, where the Christian and Jewish lambs used to lie down, more or less peaceably, with the Islamic lion. . We are used to variegated sounds of traffic in Las Pinedas (pop. 197): the irregular clop of horses' hooves as they trip over the speed-bumps, the curses of our neighbour when bitten by his mule, the racket of young death-seekers hurtling blindly through the streets on rackety scooters, the Roland-at-Roncesvalles horn-calls of Pepi the bread-lady as she summons her customers still in their curlers and night-dresses to their front doors of a morning, the ever-sleeker burble of ever-vaster tractors, their farm implements scraping paint off the parked cars in the narrow streets... The sound of the Googlecar was different from all of these. A whirring whine of aircon and heavy rubber, like a Humvee on the streets of Baghdad - appropriately enough, since it was carrying out an aggressive invasion of other peoples' living-space. Indeed were it not for a discreet Google colophon low down on the shiny black hull we might well have believed from its curious goggling head-on-stalk that the Martians had taken over General Motors.

Undoubtedly the Googlecar was invading our space - and doing so without a by-your-leave or thank-you. But look at it from our point of view: all we 197 inhabitants of Las Pinedas. The last time there was any excitement in this village was a few winters back when snow fell here for the first time in 70 years and the whole population, including those in wheel-chairs, turned out to throw snowballs. Before that....? Well, Marshal Soult is rumoured to have withdrawn the Grande Armee through Las Pinedas in 1812, but as there is some doubt whether the village had yet been built at that time, this is scarcely a hot topic to while away the time between games of dominos at the Bar Gran Parada. In short, though the Googlecar arrived in the village in the siesta hour when almost everyone was asleep - I leapt to my bedroom window when I heard the suprising sound, so I am one of the very few eye-witnesses - its presence is potentially the biggest thing to happen to Las Pinedas since its foundation in the early 19th century as part of the re-colonisation of Andalucia by Saxon farmers (most of them soon went home). So inevitably the following evening everyone within a mule-ride of a computer was glued to a screen, tabbing frantically to get Las Pinedas up on Google Earth.

Bitter disappointment followed. Neither then, nor now a year later, have the streets of Las Pinedas (all five of them - or nine if you include the roads on the four sides of the central Plaza de Andalucia) - been accessible on Google Earth. New York, yes. London, yes. Paris, yes. Venice, yes. But Las Pinedas (pop. 197), no! A year later the half-eaten bocadillos are still curling on the plates beside the abandoned monitor screens, the last unfinished fino has dried down to a yellow smear at the bottom of the glass, and not a squeak comes from the computer mice, inert on their Real Madrid mouse-mats beside the untapped key-boards (Real Madrid was Franco's favourite team; in Franco's day closet Republicans supported Barcelona; Las Pinedas is still a Real Madrid village).

What have New York, London, Paris and Venice got that Las Pinedas (pop. 197) hasn't got? - we ask ourselves What has Las Pinedas done to deserve to be dropped off the map? Because our village is not displayed by Google Earth it de facto no longer exists. All 197 of us have suddenly been `redacted' from planet earth and `renditioned' to an electronic refugee-camp for the digitally stateless, a Sangatte for the `sans images', the `sin imagenes' - those without the means of visual identification necessary for modern life

All this despite the fact that to move with the times Las Pinedas - trs. `The Pine-Trees' - felled its last pine-tree, a fine umbrella pine unusual for this area, only a couple of years ago. What else does Las Pinedas have to do to bring itself back into contention with the modern world? How else can it stake its claim for a reasonable share of global attention? When does the population of Las Pinedas get its 15 minutes of fame?

Be reaussured, however, that Las Pinedas has not given up hope. Even as your Spanish correspondent scribes these lines, Las Pinedas' parish council is in secret session, drawing up a letter to President Obama himself. I shall be giving nothing away that you won't shortly be hearing from the roof-tops of the world, if I tell you now that Las Pinedas is bidding to become a site for the Star Wars anti-missile missiles which the Russians have made the USA withdraw from their planned positions in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Bar Gran Parada has already promised to expand its catering facilities with a Burger bar and a Dunkin' Do-Nuts for all those hungry uniformed American boys and girls. The primary school playground will be doubled in size and hardened to provide a combined heli-pad and baseball mound. The old railway line, currently a cycle-track, will be relaid with tarmac for emergency evacuation of the obese. As for precise location of the command post - in the interest of security I must seal my lips - but as the faithful in Las Pinedas are well aware, there is a little-used vestry at the back of the Church, which subject to a pecuniary negotiation with the flower-arranging ladies regarding access to the cold-water tap, ought to be a shoe-in for the C-in-C.

Citizens of the world! Google Inc. may not yet allow you to look down at Las Pinedas. But all that could change on a nod and a wink from General Petraeus. And meanwhile remember, Las Pinedas (pop. 197) is already looking down on you!

Nicholas Tresilian
Las Pinedas
Cordoba
Spain

From: 藤幡正樹 [masaki]

2009-10-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

Sent: 18 August 2009 07:17
To: glenn@artstation.org.uk

Subject: Re: RGC

Hi Glenn,

Google Map is a straight forward example of using GPS and image.

Perhaps, the original motivation of this application is a service for the customer to give them the real view inside the map. It is also same concept of VR.

But right after they started this service many people complain not to show my face on it. To see the others means to expose mine. It is a similar structure of the mirror.

Then the whole Google map showing now the ghost town. Because there is no author. We need the responsible person who reflect to the world, who can only put humans into this ghost town. Artistic view and responsibility is needed for this.

It was not so much successful but an interesting example where done at Ars Electronica 2007. Gerfried use an airplane scanner, which is owned by a technical company in Graz, MSN own this company for competing to Google map, for scanning whole the city of LInz on the certain day along the festival 2007.

The residents were announced this activity and many people made signs or sculpture like objects on their gardens. It was interesting idea.

One another discussion is perhaps what is the difference to the conventional map. Map on the paper are filled with symbols. Those symbols can kick our Imagination but a real photographic images stops to imagine. It all fixed images.

It remains me the contrast between movie and animation. I remember one important aspect that is the voice or sound. I suppose sonic information is another important aspect.

To reverse Google car means to expose yourself to the image everywhere. It's a bit pity I can't stay in the UK longer. I must back to Oldenburg, Germany right after the show in Ireland.

Hope to see you again soon,

best,
Masaki Fujihata

2009-10-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

I like that - everyone should have a Google camera and we (the citizens) can appear throughout the map avoiding the blindspot of GC. Masaki's surround camera - being able to see the 'view keeper', 'view maker' ...the maps originator is fed back into the map emphising the performance of mapping

Charlie Gere

2009-10-06T02:05:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with the Google Car is that it effaces itself in the production of the images it takes. It is, literally, a blind spot in the scene, necesssarily perhaps because of the way the images are taken. It gives the impression of an almost angelic, dematerialised subject, capable of traversing the landscapes in question, without being part of them, without itself occupying them physically, without being part of them or taking responsibility for its own presence. This produces a kind of asymmetry in the relation between the viewed and the source of the view, much like all surveillance, in which we can be seen without seeing who is seeing us. It is also at odds with the actual visibility of the cars themselves. That said cars are also a means of remaining invisible while being able to see, especially with darkened windows. I have two solutions, which could work together; one is that the videos should be taken by Google Pedestrians, not Google Cars, and the other is that they should use some form of recording technology that includes them in the scene. It just so happens that Japanese new media artist Masaki Fujihata has developed the very thing - a special video camera apparatus that takes a panoramic view in which the cameraperson is part of the scene, and with which he walks around various environments.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ua0w_morels-panorama_creation

The Commissioner and the Removal Tool

2009-10-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8014178.stm

Google's Street View technology carries a small risk of privacy invasion but should not be stopped, the UK's Information Commissioner has ruled.

Privacy International had complained to the Information Commissioner along with 74 others, requesting the service be suspended, because some individual's faces were identifiable on Street View.

"We recognise that a small minority of people may not wish their house to be included in the service which is why we have created easy to use removals tools," he added.

Reversing the Google Car.

2009-10-05T03:34:00.000-07:00

I live in a democratic society….?
A company, Google, originating from another country has just gone and ‘mapped’ me! I was not asked about this, so far as I am aware. Do I mind? Could this be something which impinges upon me and therefore something I/we should be critical of ? Should I have prepared a defence, a counter, or at the very least prepared a position relative to such a momentous event?

In many ways a corporation like Google are doing no more that any number of corporate interests in our whereabouts. If you use supermarkets, collection of your personal details automatically happens when you use a bank card to pay for goods. Payment by plastic ties you to a time, place, postcode and logs varying degrees of detail on purchase-preferences across products and brands. We are used to our data being counted and sifted under the guise of providing a variety of choice and other helpful commercial platitudes. We then have to contend with a plethora of targeted advertising for our trouble.

The opaque nature of intrusion into our citizen privacy, is constantly monitored and often challenged by organisations like www.privacyinternational.org. But who looks at what Google is doing?

Searching and representation appear to be a constituency to which Google belongs. Consider a report like the business owner in the link below, who challenges the selection algorithms employed by Google Search Engine to place his company in a Google search engine results page (SERP). http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=14240. Also on this forum, ‘Tripodero’ complains, Google Search is “…actually reading the HTML!...” from his company web pages. He shows examples of the messy, non-businesslike listing in the Google SERP and he asks, “Is there anyway I can fix this?” I guess not!?

The Google Search connects to Google Maps, allowing a user to access the geographical implications of a web search. The search engine has in a sense canonised the map, providing the first step into Google Maps by searching and representing location.

Google Map’s are recorded by Satellite, the Street View is recorded by vehicles of various types. Cars are used for roads and bikes are used on pedestrian ways, cycle paths and non traffic streets in our towns and cities.

Images are recorded by the vehicles and afforded a Global Position (GPS), recording coordinates of where the image was recorded in the world. When the images are collected and processed they are presented to consumers through Google’s browser based on line service. It is here that most of us first encounter Google maps and street view and where an intriguing set of fragmentations can be observed.

The Times newspaper reports Google complaint stories; the fact that you can ask Google to remove your house, your face or even your whole body from Google Street View, if you are not convinced that you cannot be recognised, which is an infringement of your human rights…http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5945132.ece

and:

http://geocarta.blogspot.com/2005/10/more-complaints-over-google-maps.html
Here is a complaint by President Abdul Kalam on questions of security and the potential help to terrorists. This is echoed below in Northern Ireland.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/technology-gadgets/google-maps-street-view-lsquomay-be-a-security-threatrsquo-14237716.html
“…Stormont Assembly member Ian Paisley jnr has branded the internet giant (Google) “reckless” for including photos of the perimeters of police stations and army barracks in Northern Ireland…” Such is the state of concern.

The link below contains the story of someone who has built their own D-I-Y, surround camera system for his car, competing with the Google Car. Someone comments on the page, why would you want to build your own camera car? http://gizmodo.com/5371100/diy%20-google-street-view-camera-lets-you-infuriate-shut+ins-for-fun-and-profit (someone for the festival I instantly thought!)

The RGC project is pursuing the question what do Google Maps and Google Street View mean to us?

I /we, take my/our life/lives as a foreground and its placement in the background of my choice seriously. This is composition. My work as a citizen is about composing myself upon the landscape around me. As a 21 century citizen, should I have expected to have been consulted on my being pictorially mapped? For I was not ! Certainly I should, because this act usurps and interrupts the ‘private intentionality of citizen composition’.

Google are now challenging us by producing an entirely new image to our reality; that which has become Google Maps and Google Street View.

At its widest view Google Earth presents a Globe which can be turned to present different views of the continents and the poles. The view point is taken from space. The view point is omnipotent, God like, from here the globe may be ‘held’ or ‘visited’. By zooming in, the closest details of street view are accessed via gradual enlargements and changes of pictorial resolution which, depending on speed of internet connection, may be continuous or in haltering stages.

Arriving in Street View
Images collected by Google are a-temporal, recorded area by area, each representing a different time zone. A patchwork of images which when stitched together present a Whole. It is not a Whole. What is the effect of this upon us?

The city presented by Google is as Fujihata notes full of ‘ghosts'. Blurry parts of people arching, blurring, tweening between frames of ill fitting earth history. Most potent are images of my place and where I have been. Where is everyone in the city? (Fujihata) and from who’s viewpoint are we looking (Davidson and Fujihata)? Who indeed is responsible for this viewpoint? (Fujihata and Davidson) and who will take responsibility for it (Fujihata)?

In a world of maps created by and for the ruling classes, the fundamental difference with Google is the mirage and mirror of our world and the Golden Standard it proposes its self as (Groves C.)

GD Oct 1st 2009

Reversing the Google Car at the festival

2009-10-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.chapter.org/17071.html
http://www.mayyouliveininterestingtimes.org.uk/

Project Outline
Glenn Davidson (Artstation) is commissioned to create a ‘sousveillance’ exploring what a Reversing the Google Car (RGC) might mean and look like. Leading up to the Festival Glenn has been discussing the RGC with a diverse range of invited ‘guests’ to find out how to reverse the Google Car, starting off by looking at its various effects upon us. The conversations will contribute to a public drawing to evoke the issues of e.g. being mapped with out being asked.

The process will endeavour to proffer a retaliatory vision, a small reverse in the ongoing saga of our observed condition. During the Festival the conversation and the drawing will be opened up in a session that develops the emergent themes, and presents the drawing.

Amongst contributors to RGC will be Charlie Gere (author of Art, Time & Technology) and other practitioners and theorists drawn from Architecture, Cultural Studies, Art Practice, Art Theory, Film, Computer Science, Anthropology, Government,plus many generalists... If you have ideas you would like to express about Google maps, the product of Google and their car, and/or would like to contribute to this project, please contact below.
You May Fund is a May You Live in Interesting Times commission that was made possible by Safle with the financial assistance of the Arts Council of Wales.

The following blog is of invited guests who will reflect on what Reversing the Google Car means to them. Please contact glenn@artstation.org.uk if you would like to be part.

Reversing the Google Car

May 15th 2010

AndalOcio - CÓRDOBA SE VISTE DE AZUL POR EL DÍA DE EUROPA

18th Jan 2010 Janet Chan: Police Cellphone Recordings from Roger Clarke

Positive Uses of Surveillance

Different Maps

From Rob Owen - Google Car reminds me...

Eyeborg from Janet Chan

Chris Groves - What does the Google Car want?

From: 藤幡 正樹 [masaki]

Charlie Gere

The Commissioner and the Removal Tool

Reversing the Google Car.

Reversing the Google Car at the festival

From: 藤幡正樹 [masaki]