Portland, Oregon Reacts to Google Street View’s Glaze

An article in The Oregonian documents some of the reactions of Portland, Oregon residents, to Google Street View which just included Portland among the 15 U.S. cities which the service encompasses.

To some, Google’s latest service is a novelty for exploring cities without leaving the house. Others consider the images an intrusion, one more high-tech tool eroding a collective sense of privacy.

“I think that’s a little too invasive to go on something like Google,” said Carol Williams, president of the Parkrose Heights Association of Neighbors in Northeast Portland. “If we didn’t have a crime problem, I wouldn’t have a problem either. But you don’t know who’s going to be looking at those.”

[...]

Such precision concerns Adella Macdonald, executive director of the YWCA of Greater Portland. She said her organization’s domestic violence shelter contacted Google a few weeks ago and asked the company to obscure images that could identify the shelter’s location or residents.

Google complied, she said, but Macdonald worries that domestic violence victims living outside shelters might be tracked down by an obsessive ex-husband scanning Portland streets online in search of a familiar car.

“It gives you pause,” she said. “When is enough too much?”

That’s a question University of Oregon law professor Garrett Epps is asking, too. There’s no law that would block Google-style street photos, and Epps said he can’t imagine one that would pass constitutional muster.

“Taking photos and distributing photos is certainly a form of speech,” he said, and is therefore protected by the First Amendment.

But, Epps added, just because something is legally protected doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

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