Filed under: Google
In the town of Riverhead, NY, you apparently need a special permit to have a swimming pool. Not everybody with a pool has a permit, though, and the town has been using Google Earth to find people's unapproved pools. The city council recently decided to cancel this Google Earth spy mission, though, and only prosecute when pool violations can be seen from public areas.
In some cases, satellite imagery can be important evidence to protect public safety, but watching your swimming pool hardly seems like a reason for a town to get all Big Brother. What I find interesting about this decision isn't that the town very reasonably decided to stop a practice that probably cost them more in bad press than it gained them in pool fines and safety improvements, it's that they made a distinction between what any citizen can see on the internet and what any citizen can see by walking down a public street.
The debate isn't about pools, it's about the grey area between digital public information and public information in meatspace. That's not something that one New York town is going to resolve overnight, but Riverhead sure makes an interesting case study.
[via Switched]Town stops using Google Earth to spy on people's pools originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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