Robin Wilton

Where would we be without him? I’d certainly have a lot less grist for the blog-mill, that’s for sure.

My gratitude to Eric goes back to my days at Sun Microsystems: I was one of Sun’s ‘privacy people’ when Scott McNealy made his “get over it” crack… a remark which was thrown back in my face many a time, if I stood up and tried to tell an audience that Sun was serious about privacy management. Until, that is, the day when Scott was knocked off the number one spot by Mr Schmidt’s “if there’s something you don’t want anyone to know about, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it” remark.

I call it the WOMBAT league – the White Male Billionaire Anti-Privacy Technocrats… and the outsider coming up fast on the outside is, of course, Mr Mark “no longer a social norm” Zuckerberg.

Some of Mr Schmidt’s remarks seem so off the wall that they’re easy to mock (fun, too, as Homer would say…), but this week he’s quoted as saying, in an interview on CNN, that if people are concerned about Streetview and privacy, all they need to do is move. I think this raises some genuine issues which need serious consideration. I mean, up to now I have to admit, I had not thought of moving house as a possible solution. I mean, I have already asked to have my home redacted from the images – but now that the idea’s been put in my head, I might just move as well, just to be on the safe side.

And that’s going to give Google a problem. What if the person who buys my house is less paranoid than me, and wants their frontage re-instated? You see, Eric has promised that the Streetview car only gets one shot at it. He’s not going to send it out again just to do one house.

Naturally, you’ve spotted the flaw in my logic: of course they won’t have to re-photograph the house; they can just un-obfuscate it, because the data is still there. In other words, what they need is a consent management system with “opted-out” as the default setting. Except that, if they had one of those, I wouldn’t have to move house in the first place. Now, you all figured that out in the space of about 3 lines… so should we be concerned that the first solution that leaps to Eric’s mind is “why don’t you just move house”?

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