In the news this morning, fresh fears over privacy have been raised, but by two very separate incidents.
The first is a clamp down on car tax dodgers through Automatic Number Plate Recognition usage, in Wiltshire.
The second concerns ubiquitous search engine Google, which is changing its Street View privacy policy to ensure that imagery obscures faces and car number plates.
What is Street View? It’s Google’s new and fancy virtual street mapping tool that lets you virtually stroll the streets of the US as realistically as if you were there in the flesh.
It was only this very weekend that I was putting forward some concerns over Street View to NumberPlateGuy – as he was deftly demonstrating this new wonder of Internet technology – “what about people’s faces, and what about number plates!”
But Google didn’t reconsider their position on displaying faces and number plates off their own steam – the changes to Street View’s policy came about as a public reaction to concerns over privacy.
Anyhow, the technology has yet to be made available to the UK so we needn’t worry about Googler’s being able to view inside our houses, or peek at our number plates, just yet.
The person on the street might be concerned about having their number plate beamed out to millions of Google users, but if you owned private registration plates like L3 00K and P3 EKK, maybe you’d want to get some attention!
Coinciding with the recent increase in the use of Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems, the DVLA are in the news again today for privacy related issues – and this time the fearful are solely motorcyclists.
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