Google legally framed public spaces as unauthorized surveillance territory

Evidence

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 Capitalism, 444

Categorization

• SEED: Legal rhetoric as a dispossession tool — an essay angle on how corporate lawyers precondition public acceptance through language that reframes extraction as customary.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far does this ‘words do legal work’ framing extend in sett-leasing norms around data extraction today?
• XREF: connects to: Every Google service expansion has drawn legal and social opposition — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 439; Google’s Street View debut disguised surveillance expansion as friendly privacy respect — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 447; Google’s mapping games served as test beds for expanding surveillance capitalism into physical space — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 472 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Google’s Street View debut disguised surveillance expansion as friendly privacy respect #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 447
• Google institutionalized surveillance capitalism by simply declaring its right to take experience as data #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1078
• Google’s leaders leveraged First Amendment claims as legal shelter for surveillance inventions #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 349
• Google’s mapping games served as test beds for expanding surveillance capitalism into physical space #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 472
• National security demand for surveillance let Google’s practices grow unregulated #qualifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 384
• The Patriot Act spatially policed the domestic public sphere #exemplifies (0.72)