Diego Saldana
03/20/2026
CYSE201S
In the excerpt text from author Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Googleization of Everything” they argue that people’s privacy concerns over the rollout of Google Street View are perfectly valid, and that they should continue to be concerned over these things rather than allow the conscience of the public zeitgeist to shift to alternate issues. Vaidhyanathan points out near the end of the excerpt that different cultures and people have different definitions of what they consider privacy and that Google’s current policy in place to opt out after the fact is insufficient to protect folks who rightfully see it as a breach of privacy, siting the amount of time and effort required to go through the process being too high for the average person to want to bother, if they find out about a Street View picture that they feel violates them at all. In this Case Analysis I will argue that utilitarian morality shows us that Google should have done more comprehensive studies in order to understand the incredible overreaching scope of the service they intended to employ, rather than asking for forgiveness after the fact.
In chapter 5 from the text “The 4th Revolution. How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality” titled “Privacy” by author Luciano Floridi, he elucidates two major concepts. The first of which dominates the majority of the chapter, a subject he coins informational friction, discusses such forces which oppose informational flow in a region of the Infosphere. Things like VPNs, end-to-end encryption, and no-log policies which prohibit the storage of data (such as a company like NordVPN possesses) would be considered to raise information friction. Versus a service such as OneDrive which seeks to lower information friction to the benefit of its users. The second major concept that Floridi discusses further into the chapter is that of how personal data should be viewed from a conceptual and legal standpoint, with him arguing that a person is an amalgamation of their personal data and that such harm and collection of such data should be conceptualized as harm or collection of the person themselves legally. This updated version of privacy and data collection law would address the two major questions that Floridi poses near the beginning of the chapter. “Why have ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies) made privacy one of the most obvious and pressing issues in our society? And what is privacy after the fourth revolution?” Through his aggregation of ideas the answer becomes fairly clear, new ICTs have swung too far in one direction of smoothing and reducing informational friction while simultaneously eroding any counterbalances that could have been taken by the consumer, legally recognizing personal data as the person it is derived from grants it certain protections that it currently does not have due to its definition of property. This idea transfers to the issue of Google Street View with a near perfect fit solution for the issue at hand. People that feel there is an issue of privacy due to the loss of informational friction caused by the posting of their abode and surroundings feel that way because a home tends to feel like a part of who you are. And when that is suddenly posted online for anybody with an internet connection to see, it completely eliminates the informational friction that geography and distance formerly posed in keeping that dwelling private. As for my theoretical answer to how Google could have gone about this issue through the lense of utilitarian morality? I believe that the Street View mode on Google Maps should have been reserved to only industrial, commercial, tourism, and public service focused areas, and businesses that choose to opt in before being pictured. Residences should be entirely absent from the service, as there is no discernable reason to post a home on a service such as Google Street View when intentional service-based sites such as Zillow or Redfin already exist and provide significantly more in-depth information about a home or apartment that Street View simply does not. While I understand that there are specific use cases for Street View, the vast majority of such cases would still be more than viable under this new policy. Any cases that require more critical information about a residential area would clearly be important enough to go and physically gather the information in a less invasive way that would expose exponentially less personal information to the Internet. This new system that targets specific sectors and businesses who specifically opt-in completely eliminates the worries of privacy conscious people and still accomplishes the main goal of Street View which is to help navigate more dense areas that need a more granular perspective rather than the bird’s eye view offered by Google Maps. It also has the major benefit of being significantly less work for Google than maintaining and regularly updating the current massive database of information that it is required to run a service like Street View. It is a win for both parties involved.
The second text I will be pulling from is an excerpt from the Widener Law Journal by author James Grimmelmann titled, “Privacy as product safety”. Grimmelmann’s main idea that he poses throughout this article is that better product design is what he believes to be the capstone principle in how companies can better their online applications in order to ensure user data is made, stored, and transferred to where it needs to be without unreasonably damaging user privacy. One example he gives is that of a punch press having guards that disallow the user to stick their hands inside while the machine is operational. A more poignant example he gave later was that of Facebook’s own private messaging service not having a “forward” button that a user could click on that would violate the privacy of those in the conversation even accidentally. He expands upon this idea with the proposition that good product design also includes making the consequences for the failure of misuse predictable to the user. A relevant example would be the sticker on a woodchipper that displays the consequences of sticking one’s arm into it while it is on. Many of today’s social media apps have no such guardrails whether it be an oversight of the original design or intended as a feature under the misconception that the generations that use these applications today no longer care about their own privacy while interacting with others. In reality everyone still expects a reasonable level of privacy based on how they perceive information to spread through these platforms. I, for example, have an Instagram account that I keep private. I do not want anybody except people I have allowed to be my friends on the platform—almost exclusively people I know closely in the real world—to see the reels I have liked and reposted. Nor do I want random people to see the pictures and videos that I have posted that contain very real information on me and where I live, the vehicle I drive, my family, and close friends. If Instagram were to suddenly quietly announce that they would be reducing the restrictions that the private account system places on the information held on that account, such as liked reels, it could pose a very real danger to me and my future. However, the unfortunate outcome is that I would lose the few benefits that I enjoy from having a social media account such as contact with friends I don’t see regularly, because of erasing my account and deleting the application. The author points out that social media does have very real positive benefits when employed and used correctly, and I unfortunately find myself agreeing with him. The main point of this entire digression is this, companies should have an obligation to focus on good product design which includes comprehensive guard rails that at least make the attempt of steering users towards actions that would be in their best interest. Whereas currently we have applications that obfuscate exactly what a user’s action will have when they use a feature, make a post, or communicate through their messaging service. Taking this idea from Grimmelmann that privacy is a feature that can be baked into the infrastructure of online applications through applying the lense of superior product design and employing the thought process of utilitarian morality to the topic of Google’s Street View service provides no clearer answer than the one I listed in the paragraph before. The only realistic way to deal with privacy with a service as large and comprehensive as Street View is to ensure that the average user’s data is never gleaned in the first place. Even if Google were to release and specifically send out a tool that allows personalized redactions to everyone whose property is pictured, there is simply no way logistically to ensure this tool arrives in the hands of people who desire to use it. Not every has a working personal computer of some kind, or internet with which to receive email or messaging with. Good product design, in this case, is tailoring the product to a slightly different use case and scope entirely, rather than attempting to hand consumers a proverbial roll of gauze to stem the flow of data bleeding themselves.
In closing, I have used the information and ideas posed by authors Luciano Floridi and James Grimmelmann in order to garner greater understanding into the thought processes of online consumers and the ebb and flow of data as the level of informational friction changes with evolving technologies. The average person still has the reasonable expectation of privacy that is supposed to be protected under the Fourth Amendment of the United States and companies should be held to a standard that meets that end regardless of what they think the positive outcome of a product may be. While a service like Street View may be beneficial to some under niche use cases, to the absolute overwhelming majority it is an unwarranted and unnecessary breach of privacy that they will never use. As such it should be tailored more towards those niche use cases which narrows that scope of the product, reducing overhead and maintenance costs for Google and bolstering privacy for individuals who will never touch the service but would rather not have their homes posted online for anyone with internet access to view.