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Comment by SuchAnonMuchWow | Hacker News Reader

I think we have fundamentally different opinions on what control you should be allowed to have on your privacy.

There is a similar debate about being photographed while in public: the fact that I'm walking in the street shouldn't allow anybody to take pictures of me, just because it has been decided that doing so would remove any "expectation of privacy".

That's my image. That's my house. If I don't want people to take picture of it and put in on the internet, it's my choice. And I don't think it is that unreasonable to want to control it.

I don't care about cityscape where the picture is taken from afar, where you can not discern any details of my house. But I don't want strangers to be able to see for example if I have dogs just by googling my address on internet.

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It's not an unreasonable desire to want to control it, but you should also consider what it leads to when applied universally. For example, Street View is now almost completely disabled in Germany. I find it a beneficial public service and would be saddened if it was disabled in my country. Similarly, I could not publish a book in France whose cover is an image of the Louvre pyramid - this part of the public sphere has been rendered someone's intellectual property. Something that is seemingly public, inviting and free to use has been made in part private. Not good.

In a world where free public spaces are becoming increasingly rare, we should strive to retain and protect them rather than make everything private and controlled.

That being said, I do think the privacy of what is clearly and truly in the private sphere should be protected strongly – such as what goes on inside your house outside of what is directly and easily visible to the street. But there need to be just as strong rights to enjoy the virtues of the public sphere to counterbalance the strong protection of the private sphere.

> In a world where free public spaces are becoming increasingly rare, we should strive to retain and protect them rather than make everything private and controlled.

by empowering a private company to profit from what this person considers to be private?

By empowering anyone to make free use of what is clearly public. Private company building a service to show streetscape around world should be no different than me publishing photography I took around the city in my blog.

That sounds like a very different argument.

How come?

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