Street View first entered public awareness with an apparently benign blog post. Peter Fleischer, Google’s “privacy counsel,” helped launch the new “service” by writing a paean celebrating America’s “noble tradition” of public spaces, where, he claimed, “people don’t have the same expectations of privacy as they do in their homes.” As a lawyer, Fleischer knows the work that words do in establishing contracts and setting precedents, so it pays to read his 2007 words with care. His casually declarative prose undertakes some extraordinary work as he asserts that all public spaces are fair game for Google’s taking. In his account, any public space is a fitting subject for the firm’s new breed of incursion without authorization, knowledge, or agreement. Homes, streets, neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities: they are no longer local scenes where neighbors live and walk, where residents meet and talk. Google Street View, we are informed, claims every place as just another object among objects in an infinite grid of GPS coordinates and camera angles.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 444