Street View and Security

Those who aren’t completely lost behind some form of wagon or other have seen Google Maps’ “Street View” function. It’s where you can actually see pictures of the street you’re searching for – hell, some of you might even have seen yourselves somewhere around where you live or work in that thing. I know I have. There I am, hard at work. Well, not that hard, but still very much at work clocking up the old hours.

There’s been a lot of discussion as to whether this function is a security risk or a security asset – some of the normal fundamentalists have of course been raving about this for a long time already, trying to have it banned, trying to get Google to censor “high-risk” sites, and so on and so forth. That hasn’t worked, obviously.

The trouble is, Google’s car(s) drive around on public roads, and that means that every single image that they have out there could just as easily have been taken by anyone else, at any time, only Google actually blurs the faces of people, and the license plates of cars, for example. To anyone but the actual person in the picture, or the owner of the car, it could be anyone, or anyone’s.

Now, instead of trying to stop the proliferation of information that is actually public, why not try and use the information about what is exposed to make things safer and more secure? If a picture, for example, reveals a hole in embassy security, then use that info to plug the hole.

It’s just an exhausted thought at 2:20 am…