Does Google Street View racially profile people ?

Has Google, with its Street View ’service’, inadvertently created a racial profiling system ?

Vehicles equipped with panoramic cameras tour the streets and byways of the world taking pictures of everything they come across. The results are then displayed on Google pages.

It doesn’t matter whether or not people captured by Gargle SnoopMobiles want to be included. They are, without ever having given their permission. If they want out, they have to ask.

Gogle, probably the internet’s largest and most prolific advertising company, touts Street View as a ’service’. It is, however, just another product and Switzerland, one of the countries featured, is now going after it in the courts, as p2pnet posted yesterday.

“Switzerland’s data protection authority said Friday it will sue Google for allegedly failing to obscure faces, license plates and other sensitive images from its Street View photo mapping Web application,” said the IDG News Service, going on :

“It’s the latest problem for Street View, which debuted to controversy in the U.K. and raised concerns when vehicles mounted with periscope cameras began shooting imagery in Germany earlier this year.”

So when the complaints started flooding in, did Google immediately suspend all operations and take the sites offline while it fixed the problems ?

It was, and still is, bidniz as usual. But as we’ve noted before, Hey ! When you’re an 800-pound gorilla ...

32-item montage

p2pnet reader Marc spent hours surfing Street View and p2pnet ran the results in what’s probably the only detailed online coverage of easily visible Street View images.

However, that’s not all he found.

Said Eric in a Reader’s Write to our latest post on Google’s apparent intransigence, “I doubt those three guys sitting on the wall were having an abortion.”

He was referring to one of the Google Street View pix showing an abortion clinic in Switzerland identified by Marc and which we’d miniaturised for a 32-item montage. However, as we pointed out, “even at these very considerably reduced sizes, some of the people might still be recognizable”. So we obscured them in red.

Marc told Eric » » »

Nope, they were just sitting there about 1 block away from the abortion clinic. Sitting in front of their slum homes across the street.

What *is* significant is that most black people are not blurred at all. Most every black person I came across is in the same unblurred state.

A few things that I noticed that causes the “blur” to *not* kick in :

1. If you are non-white
2. If you wear shades or glasses
3. If you have a hat on (ie baseball cap)

From all the time I spent looking into this, the above 3 conditions are true, regardless of what anyone, or thing, has to say.

Check it out. You will also find this to be true.

The above 3 conditions hold true for gargle Swiss and boogle Canada (I only looked at these two in depth for many, many, hours).

It also holds true for Billboards, hence the billboard example in the pic above.

In the story, we’d included a spoofed KFC pic to illustrate a statement made by assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

“We’ve found many instances where people’s faces aren’t blurred”, she said, according to the Canwest News Service, which went on, “In some cases, the face of KFC’s Colonel Sanders or faces on billboards captured in shots are blurred instead.”

Meanwhile, “Color/race determines if you are blurred with gogle,” said Marc. “It cannot be denied.”

Here’s the compilation. The men Eric refers to are far right in the top row.