6 ms·

Privacy Implications for OpenStreetView

82 points by GammaDelta 10y ago

m-jones 10y ago
Cock-up before conspiracy. OpenStreetView isn't intended to intrude, it is just naivety on the creators part. It will be solved in some capacity sooner or later, if not for genuine concern for peoples privacy, to avoid negative media attention.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I think that's a fair assessment, but still, it's important to raise the issue sooner rather than later.
MarkEthan 10y ago
The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize. As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash. As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper & start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from the street will just become less private over time.
- cuu508 10y ago
  And quality blurring may be tricky to implement. On Google Street View, street name plates and road signs are often blurred, because the algorithm is not sure if they are licence plates or not, and blurs too much. For Open Street View, this would defeat the purpose of having the photos.
  - jforberg 10y ago
    "Because it's hard" is not a very good reason to neglect doing something when you know it's the right thing to do. The right thing to do would have been to avoid publishing these photos until you have the means to anonymise them properly, or to use a service like Google Vision and pay the small fee to get someone else to do it.
mastazi 10y ago
How do you actually use openstreetview.org? All I could see was a map, no imagery. At first some roads were highlighted in pink but as soon as I zoomed and panned a little bit, the pink lines disappeared...
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  It's under heavy load at the moment (probably some scaling issues), so responses are a bit slow. You click on the pink lines (and wait).
  - sdoering 10y ago
    Even loading the pink lines took about 60 seconds last time I tried. So the heavy load seems to be very heavy indeed.
  - mastazi 10y ago
    Oh yes, it works now. It was probably HN's hug of death.
upofadown 10y ago
Shouldn't it be possible to let people do their own blurring for the case where the automatic stuff doesn't work? There isn't going to be that much to blur if this is all straight ahead views from a car. You don't see many people on the road from lower than car roof level. Those on the sidewalks will be pretty far away. The issue with Google is that the point of view is deliberately made high enough to clear cars in other lanes. So in practice the privacy thing might not a huge issue here unless a significant number of people start mounting cameras on poles.
jMyles 10y ago
Reading into the details of these kinds of "privacy implications" (particularly the desire to force publication delay and the force blurring of people or license plates), I'm left thinking that the "implications" are more stark for freedom than they are for privacy. Are there really privacy implications of any sort in publishing a series of photos of people and cars on a street that aren't already implicated by the knowledge that Google and / or the NSA already have far better photos of the same scenes? On a more fundamental level: isn't publishing, in real time and high quality, a photo (or series of photos) of a public area essentially for freedom of the press? And doesn't the insertion of a "privacy" claim that threaten that freedom? I know it's specifically enshrined in the US Constitution, but in an age of ubiquitous cameras and publication media, it's equally important in Australia and around the world, no? We can opt either to allow each other to share our eyes and ears unto infinity, putting criminals and power brokers on notice that their actions in public are preserved for all time, or we can decide to close and cover them, leaving only criminals and power brokers to see and hear.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  > We can opt either ... or Or, we can have a compromise, since the world isn't black and white, and we needn't restrict ourselves to a binary choice. That's how the European rights work, on life, expression (speech), privacy and so on.
  - jMyles 10y ago
    With most things, I agree, but I'm not sure I see any middle ground here. Can you publish a picture taken in public, even if it includes faces and license plates, or not? This does seem binary to me.
    - xyzzy123 10y ago
      Big public projects can have policies which minimise negative externalities. You can still privately publish any photo you like, within the bounds of the law. There is lots of middle ground. "Legally you can, but morally, should you?" Time series get interesting. If it comes to actual law and courts, it's definitely context dependent. Intent matters a lot. Surf cam is more OK than "revenge cam" of ex's house. Yes that means humans ascribe morality to certain arrangements of bits (and how the bits are evaluated is affected by who they were created by, and why). No, publishing and freedom of speech are not absolute but depend on purpose and intent. To put it another way, technically child pornography is just a time series of pictures right?
moron4hire 10y ago
Perhaps we could consider what is going on here to be something of a small-townification of cities. I grew up in a small town. If something was going on out from behind closed doors, everyone knew about it. And sometimes they knew even if it was behind closed doors. Prior to the current era of data ubiquity, to escape such a thing, you could find some level of anonymity in a crowd. Walking through Times Square in NYC, you're technically in public, but you're just another unremarkable person on an unremarkable day. There is a certain level of ignorance about the greater world in a small town. I've witnessed people saying and doing very--how should I say--unprogressive things, "just" because they didn't know any better [0]. On the flip side, there is a certain level of indifference about the greater world in a city. I've seen no greater degree of true open-mindedness in cities, and I think that's due to a kind of shutting down and retreating from the full ocean of people that cities contain. In other words, whether or not a certain person lives a public-by-default or private-by-default life, they're probably going to be exactly the same. So what does this mean for privacy? Privacy is a continuum that is inversely correlated with how much contact you want to have with the outside world. 100% privacy requires 100% retreat from the world, which is childishly unrealistic. Either accept that society needs to know your face to be able to talk to you, or go move out into the desert and live a hermit's life. You can't expect to live in a community and be "anonymous", not now, not ever before. I don't agree that one should be allowed to blur themselves out of other people's photos. If you're out in public, you agree to be seen. It's childish to say, "I don't want my photo online." You might as well say, "I don't want people on the bus to see my face." They are the same exact people online as they are on the bus. [0] They should have known better, ignorance is no excuse here, but it's very easy to rationalize to yourself that the media provides an accurate depiction of people-unlike-you of whom you have no personal experience. I'm not sure my grandfather has ever met an African American man who confirms his racist stereotyping of them, but that doesn't stop him from adopting whole-cloth the image that they are all wanna-be rap stars, which I blame mostly on my grandfather being a raging asshole, but a small part on mainstream media providing black men with few other roles.
- sdoering 10y ago
  > If you're out in public, you agree to be seen. True. Seen and enshrined in some (or more) peoples fleeting memory. Not captured for (nearly) all eternity and the whole world (who were not present at that exact moment and place) to see. That is also the reason I oppose ubiquitous public surveillance. Even if it can only be seen by some amount of government actors. I am glad, that I grew up in a time without constant photography or trackability. I am glad, that I an not totally recorded with every step I take in public and that only the people who walk by might have the chance to remember my face and me being there at that moment. [Edit] formatting [/Edit]
unicornporn 10y ago
Funny, me and a friend started talking about a crowd sourced alternative to Google Street View just last week. My first thought when discussing this was: how will you normalize data? How will you provide a 360 view? I guess the answer is: you probably wont. Didn't know of this initiative, so I was happy to see people working on it. Here's the first image that popped up for me: https://imgur.com/a/ScgOd https://imgur.com/a/ScgOd Lo and behold, it's upside down. :)
- maxerickson 10y ago
  They fixed that bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331769 Mapillary has been able to recover 3d structure in areas with high photo density: http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html That's still a long way from merging the photos into a coherent view, but you quickly start to be able to 'look around'.

82 points by GammaDelta 10y ago

Cock-up before conspiracy. OpenStreetView isn't intended to intrude, it is just naivety on the creators part. It will be solved in some capacity sooner or later, if not for genuine concern for peoples privacy, to avoid negative media attention.

icebraining 10y ago
I think that's a fair assessment, but still, it's important to raise the issue sooner rather than later.

MarkEthan 10y ago

The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize. As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash. As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper & start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from the street will just become less private over time.

cuu508 10y ago
And quality blurring may be tricky to implement. On Google Street View, street name plates and road signs are often blurred, because the algorithm is not sure if they are licence plates or not, and blurs too much. For Open Street View, this would defeat the purpose of having the photos.
- jforberg 10y ago
  "Because it's hard" is not a very good reason to neglect doing something when you know it's the right thing to do. The right thing to do would have been to avoid publishing these photos until you have the means to anonymise them properly, or to use a service like Google Vision and pay the small fee to get someone else to do it.

mastazi 10y ago

How do you actually use openstreetview.org? All I could see was a map, no imagery. At first some roads were highlighted in pink but as soon as I zoomed and panned a little bit, the pink lines disappeared...

lorenzhs 10y ago
It's under heavy load at the moment (probably some scaling issues), so responses are a bit slow. You click on the pink lines (and wait).
- sdoering 10y ago
  Even loading the pink lines took about 60 seconds last time I tried. So the heavy load seems to be very heavy indeed.
- mastazi 10y ago
  Oh yes, it works now. It was probably HN's hug of death.

upofadown 10y ago

Shouldn't it be possible to let people do their own blurring for the case where the automatic stuff doesn't work? There isn't going to be that much to blur if this is all straight ahead views from a car. You don't see many people on the road from lower than car roof level. Those on the sidewalks will be pretty far away. The issue with Google is that the point of view is deliberately made high enough to clear cars in other lanes. So in practice the privacy thing might not a huge issue here unless a significant number of people start mounting cameras on poles.

jMyles 10y ago

Reading into the details of these kinds of "privacy implications" (particularly the desire to force publication delay and the force blurring of people or license plates), I'm left thinking that the "implications" are more stark for freedom than they are for privacy. Are there really privacy implications of any sort in publishing a series of photos of people and cars on a street that aren't already implicated by the knowledge that Google and / or the NSA already have far better photos of the same scenes? On a more fundamental level: isn't publishing, in real time and high quality, a photo (or series of photos) of a public area essentially for freedom of the press? And doesn't the insertion of a "privacy" claim that threaten that freedom? I know it's specifically enshrined in the US Constitution, but in an age of ubiquitous cameras and publication media, it's equally important in Australia and around the world, no? We can opt either to allow each other to share our eyes and ears unto infinity, putting criminals and power brokers on notice that their actions in public are preserved for all time, or we can decide to close and cover them, leaving only criminals and power brokers to see and hear.

Symbiote 10y ago
> We can opt either ... or Or, we can have a compromise, since the world isn't black and white, and we needn't restrict ourselves to a binary choice. That's how the European rights work, on life, expression (speech), privacy and so on.
- jMyles 10y ago
  With most things, I agree, but I'm not sure I see any middle ground here. Can you publish a picture taken in public, even if it includes faces and license plates, or not? This does seem binary to me.
  - xyzzy123 10y ago
    Big public projects can have policies which minimise negative externalities. You can still privately publish any photo you like, within the bounds of the law. There is lots of middle ground. "Legally you can, but morally, should you?" Time series get interesting. If it comes to actual law and courts, it's definitely context dependent. Intent matters a lot. Surf cam is more OK than "revenge cam" of ex's house. Yes that means humans ascribe morality to certain arrangements of bits (and how the bits are evaluated is affected by who they were created by, and why). No, publishing and freedom of speech are not absolute but depend on purpose and intent. To put it another way, technically child pornography is just a time series of pictures right?

moron4hire 10y ago

Perhaps we could consider what is going on here to be something of a small-townification of cities. I grew up in a small town. If something was going on out from behind closed doors, everyone knew about it. And sometimes they knew even if it was behind closed doors. Prior to the current era of data ubiquity, to escape such a thing, you could find some level of anonymity in a crowd. Walking through Times Square in NYC, you're technically in public, but you're just another unremarkable person on an unremarkable day. There is a certain level of ignorance about the greater world in a small town. I've witnessed people saying and doing very--how should I say--unprogressive things, "just" because they didn't know any better [0]. On the flip side, there is a certain level of indifference about the greater world in a city. I've seen no greater degree of true open-mindedness in cities, and I think that's due to a kind of shutting down and retreating from the full ocean of people that cities contain. In other words, whether or not a certain person lives a public-by-default or private-by-default life, they're probably going to be exactly the same. So what does this mean for privacy? Privacy is a continuum that is inversely correlated with how much contact you want to have with the outside world. 100% privacy requires 100% retreat from the world, which is childishly unrealistic. Either accept that society needs to know your face to be able to talk to you, or go move out into the desert and live a hermit's life. You can't expect to live in a community and be "anonymous", not now, not ever before. I don't agree that one should be allowed to blur themselves out of other people's photos. If you're out in public, you agree to be seen. It's childish to say, "I don't want my photo online." You might as well say, "I don't want people on the bus to see my face." They are the same exact people online as they are on the bus. [0] They should have known better, ignorance is no excuse here, but it's very easy to rationalize to yourself that the media provides an accurate depiction of people-unlike-you of whom you have no personal experience. I'm not sure my grandfather has ever met an African American man who confirms his racist stereotyping of them, but that doesn't stop him from adopting whole-cloth the image that they are all wanna-be rap stars, which I blame mostly on my grandfather being a raging asshole, but a small part on mainstream media providing black men with few other roles.

sdoering 10y ago
> If you're out in public, you agree to be seen. True. Seen and enshrined in some (or more) peoples fleeting memory. Not captured for (nearly) all eternity and the whole world (who were not present at that exact moment and place) to see. That is also the reason I oppose ubiquitous public surveillance. Even if it can only be seen by some amount of government actors. I am glad, that I grew up in a time without constant photography or trackability. I am glad, that I an not totally recorded with every step I take in public and that only the people who walk by might have the chance to remember my face and me being there at that moment. [Edit] formatting [/Edit]

unicornporn 10y ago

Funny, me and a friend started talking about a crowd sourced alternative to Google Street View just last week. My first thought when discussing this was: how will you normalize data? How will you provide a 360 view? I guess the answer is: you probably wont. Didn't know of this initiative, so I was happy to see people working on it. Here's the first image that popped up for me: https://imgur.com/a/ScgOd https://imgur.com/a/ScgOd Lo and behold, it's upside down. :)

maxerickson 10y ago
They fixed that bug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331769 Mapillary has been able to recover 3d structure in areas with high photo density: http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html http://blog.mapillary.com/update/2015/11/10/pointclouds.html That's still a long way from merging the photos into a coherent view, but you quickly start to be able to 'look around'.