Mary Kalin-Casey looked at Google's new StreetView and "as she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment," reports The New York Times.
"The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people's lives," Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. "The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged."
She agrees there is other information about her on Google, but:
"People's jobs are pretty public," she said. "But that doesn't mean they want a shot of their sofa on Google." She has asked Google to remove the image of her building, which was still online as of Thursday evening.
She has a point, in that there is a difference between what anybody can see walking down a particular street and making all streets viewable on a global basis.
But a collection of the Top 15 Google Street View Sightings at Mashable suggests there's not a lot to get worried about, even by the standards of people who don't get out much.
The same issues have already been raised by CCTV, satellite imagery, YouTube and Google itself. Compared to those, StreetView looks rather less threatening.
