People talk about the pros and cons of Google Street View all the time: It allows people to visit places they’ve never been before without ever leaving their couch. It also shows burglars which areas areas have the bigger fancier houses and which ones don’t have big fancy gates.
One crowd of British folk who had a problem with the idea decided to take the matter into their own hands. Instead of just requesting the picture be removed after it had been taken and used on Google Street View, they community physically forced the Google Street View car out of the area in order to stop the photos being taken in the first place.
The TimesOnline reports that as Google Street View car trundled towards Broughton with a 360-degree camera on its roof, villagers formed a human chain to stop it. While they were arranging themselves they lectured the Googler inside about the invasion of privacy and insisted he was facilitating crime by posting pictures online that could be used by burglars.
Resident Paul Jacobs was the first person to notice, according to the Times. “I was upstairs when I spotted the camera car driving down the lane,” he said. “My immediate reaction was anger; how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent? I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime.”
Mr. Jacobs described the area as affluent and claimed there’d already been three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. “If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.”
While we recognize the concerns people have with Google Street View, we laughed out loud when we read this story. If they’re so worried about robberies, they might try investing in an alarm for their house rather than trying to hide the fact that it’s there at all.