Streetview may be winning in court in the US, but they may find the legal going a bit stickier in the EU.
The furore in the British press this morning about the advent of Google Streetview in UK and NL echoes that of its US launch, when Google Streetview, which allows the casual browser to wander at will virtually peeking in windows, gardens and doors, or wherever else Google’s camera poked its invasive lens, faced legal challenges on breach of privacy grounds.
Streetview’s just been launched here in NL too, and lo and behold! There’s our house: and our bedroom window, which you can look right into. And our front door, with our names on it.
That’s because it’s obligatory when you move into a property here to register your residence with the local authority, the gemeente. They then give you or you buy an embossed nameplate (see above), which you put on your front door, usually above the letterbox or by the doorbell. (Makes it easier to round you up – the Arena bomb hoaxers arrested up the street the other day had their names on the letterbox too).
This means that what Google Streeetview has done, in effect, is to compile a visual database of the names and addresses of every resident in the Netherlands save those paranoids – or the sensible, your choice – who haven’t complied with the local gemeente‘s pettifogging door-labelling rules.
Did Google or its licensers in government ever consider that, because it’s possible to zoom in on this database and that therefore it’s accessible to any casual viewer, they are potentially in breach of EU data protection laws – specifically Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data?
Google claims it owns all Streetview data. Streetview NL is a database, although it’s visual. Surely any database containing individuals’ names and addresses should be subject to EU data protection regs? I’d certainly contend it should*.
Any EU member government body that allows or licenses Google to compile such a database might also be in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the privacy of individuals and families; broadly, it covers “private and family life, .. home and correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” .
I’m no expert on EU data protection laws and their application in NL – *I am no longer a lawyer – but that jumped right out at me.
Why didn’t it jump out to any of Google’s high-priced advocaten?
Ed “So What‘ Balls, Brown protege and current Education Minister, is trying to give himself the power to prescribe and proscribe what British children are taught by choosing what textbooks and testing regimes schools use:
Opposition MPs will attempt today to remove from the apprenticeships, skills, children and learning bill the clause that gives the secretary of state control of basic qualifications content. Guidance published alongside the bill says it could be used to specify “which authors’ works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English”.
Ministers insist the power would be exercised only as a last resort, to preserve the teaching of Shakespeare, for example, if there was a suggestion it should be scrapped from the curriculum.
One of New Labour’s many, many flaws is its propensity to bring in legislation seizing central government control in areas over which government should have no purview. This centralist tendency is allied with the mistaken conviction that if you mean well, it’s OK to make yourself dictator.
But when dissenting voices are raised to point out the totalitarian nature of yet another sweeping power they’ve abrogated to themselves, we’re told by ministers “It’s OK, don’t worry. We’ll never use it except in a emergency”. Oh well, that’s all right then. But what’s an emergency? Balls doesn’t say.
The progress of Ball’s Bill fits the usual Labour pattern. First quietly insert a small, unnoticed clause deep in one of those sprawling, unreadable, government white papers. (Ensure the drafters are so overwhelmed with draft legislation they’ll let any old bollocks through – after all, it’ll be scrutinised in committee. Won’t it?)
Make sure the bill’s published on a ‘good day to bury bad news’. In committee and in debate draw the opposition’s attention to some other contentious clause, one you don’t give a damn about. ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier…’
Watch the media and the opposition chase off futilely after that hare, while your neat little power grabbing clause slips through all its committee stages unnoticed. The thumping government majority and general supinity of your MPs sees to that.
The resulting bill sent to the Lords is so voluminous and their time so taken with other, more pressing, interests these days that a complacent and complicit House either fails to spot the bait and switch or just doesn’t care and bingo, unprecedented power is all yours.
When you start exercising those powers and the electorate protest, just tell them it was democratically decided, so STFU.
Ball’s Bill purports to be creating a more independent and fair qualifications system; but this particular little clause would allow the government of the day to interfere in what’s taught in schools, colleges and universities, even down to the choice of books. Think what New Labour could do with that.
Think what the BNP could do; but Labour MP’s don’t seem to have thought beyond the end of their control-freak noses.
This passage of this clause would mean that any political party who can do the maths and target the correct marginal constituencies successfully could, quite legally, dictate exactly what children are taught at school. The potential for political interference in education that an unpopular and discredited political party elected on a minority of the popular vote (or even with an unelected Prime Minister at the helm) might have on education of coming generations doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?
Let us also not forget that under Labour school attendance is compulsory, with prison the sanction for parents whose children do not attend. I’d write ‘Imagine if a fascistic party had these powers…’, if it weren’t so horribly close to the truth.
Yet Labour politicians individually and severally will protest loudly and volubly from the comfort of their John Lewis sofas to all available media platforms should their left wing credentials or democratic bona fides be questioned.
“Who us? Stalinist? But.. but… apartheid! Free Nelson Mandela! Some of my best friends are freedom fighters… Up the miners!”, supported by a high-pitched chorus of “But we’re nice! We’re on Twitter!” from the younger, slightly more photogenic Fabian wing.
Yet these putative soft left-wingers voted to give any future government powers any wannabe Stalin would envy.
Oh, but they’ll only use these powers ‘in an emergency’ say Labour – but it was Labour who gave themselves and any future government the power to decide what an emergency is.
One of the first bills passed in this way, the Civil Contingencies Act, was passed, we’re told, in response to 911 and other bomb attacks, although such a massive all-encompassing piece of portmanteau legislation had to have been in preparation for some time before.
It allows the government of the day to declare an emergency (it decides exactly what an emergency is), to suspend democracy, to override normal checks and balances and all local democracy and to rule by fiat. Is this is the type of emergency Balls means? Ball’s Bill, like the Civil Contingencies Act, is a license for totalitarianism.
If only out of self-preservation, has no-one in this bloody government ever stopped to consider how another less nice minority-elected government a few years down the road might use such potentially repressive powers against them? Has it never, ever occurred to anyone in the Cabinet or the Commons that Labour and its supporters might well find themselves on the receiving end one day? Apparently not, which inevitably leads one to wonder why it is they feel so invulnerable.
I suspect it’s the success of power grabs like the Civil Contingencies Act, and now Ball’s Bill, that support such complacency. With all-sweeping acts like that in their collective back pocket they can just declare an emergency if it all goes to shit, and let El Gordo and the executive reign unopposed for ever, while they continue to draw a comfortable stipend for doing precisely nothing. No wonder they’re smug.
The Opposition Tories say they will oppose this bill as written, as do the Lib Dems. They said that about the civil Contingencies Bill as well, and again about Parnell’s draconian welfare reform bill with its unprecedented interference into the autonomy of the individual .
But they can’t resist the lure of unlimited future power either. This week Parnell’s legislation passed the Commons, with Lib Dem and Tory support – and I expect Ball’s Bill will do exactly the same.
Unemployment has risen through the 2 million mark on the widest measure of joblessness while the claimant count has suffered its biggest jump on record.
The Office for National Statistics today confirmed that unemployment rose to 2.029 million in the three months to January – the highest in 12 years – a rise of 165,000 from the previous quarter.
The January figure was revised up sharply to show a rise of 93,500, up from the 73,800 reported a month ago. That means the claimant count has surged by around 600,000 in the past year.
Update: Here’s Labour’s Brian Iddon (Bolton SE) as James Purnell’s callous Welfare Reform Bill passed the Commons unopposed by the Tories or Libdems,on its third reading:
… told how he was handing over cash to a close family member to top up his jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) because it was “impossible to live on”. He said that were he not “almost doubling it” the person would not have a decent standard of living.
Should Labourhome run an annual awards ceremony for Labour politicians, activists and constituencies?
Yes
No
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
In addition to a couple of obvious awards, (twin Dinky toys to Prezza for Most Unlikely Blog Success, and a therapy gift certificate to Derek Draper for the Most Enjoyable Blog Meltdown) may I suggest The Mandy, an annual award of a magnum of Bolly for Grinding The Faces Of The Poor? I don’t think Iddon would win any such poll, being as he is so definitely off-message, but I bet Parnell’d be in with a very good chance.
Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) […] was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.
Yet Depression Amsterdam as portrayed by Eilers, particularly when neon-lit, didn’t really look that different at all: other than a bit of rebuilding, some insertion of technology and a few cosmetic and stylistic updates central Amsterdam looks more or less now the same as it did then. Now, this shop is a Tie Rack, but it looks almost the same, if not so chic.
Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack
That may be why as my taxidriver navigates the concentric rings of Amsterdam’s architectural history, shortcutting through the Golden Age to skirt the Belle Epoque and cruise down the tidy boulevards of the Amsterdam School to the dialysis unit by the ill-matched, half-empty yet prizewinning skyscrapers on Amsterdam’s southern outskirts, that I find it so easy to imagine the tramp of jackboots, the bark of Nazi officers and the avid expressions of their Dutch enablers, as they scoured the grachten and sanitised the belle epoque suburbs of unwanted aliens, jews and dissidents.
At the hospital I see any number of very old Dutch people, people in their eighties and nineties, who’d’ve been adults then. As I look at those sharp-nosed, heavy-jawed faces can’t help but wonder, was it you?
I was a bit shocked, I admit, when I found these pronographic cartoons (your mileage may vary) by 18th century satirist Thomas Rowlandson portraying our antecedents – how shall I describe it – doing what comes naturally, in colour and in great detail.
This collection of respectable (it’s Georgian, innit) wickedness has well over a thousand bookmarks on delicious alone, which is unsurprising given Rowlandson’s explicit lubriciousness. I’m only surprised it doesn’t have more. I haven’t checked Digg.
Me? I only came across it by accident whilst googling for satire and cartoon archives, I swear.
Though I knew his political cartoons such is my usual tunnel vision I had no idea Rowlandson had drawn pornography, or even that you could get such things on Wikipedia. That seems astonishingly naive of me given that well-thumbed (no, that is not a euphemism) copies of both Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Defoe’s Moll Flanders sit on my bookshelves: I’m not a modern-day Mrs. Grundy who tries to play down the Georgians’ robust attitude to sex.
But I wasn’t aware just quite how robust it was. After having seen Rowlandson’s naughty cartoons I’m not surprised that Austen’s heroines were always blushing.
I’ll never read her or Maria Edgeworth with the same eyes again. Where’s my copy of Castle Rackrent? I feel a re-read coming on.
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