On 3 October 2014 Google was fined 2,250 Canadian dollars (£1,230) for publishing an image on its Street View feature that showed a woman’s cleavage. Despite blurring her face, her car registration number and house were clearly recognisable in the photo, negating any attempts at anonymisation. The Quebec court ruled that the woman’s privacy had been invaded and that she’d experienced a loss of personal dignity after facing a barrage of sexual harassment after the picture was published.
Privacy is a difficult topic for science and technology policymakers to grapple with, both viciously complex and floatingly abstract. The generally accepted definition of privacy is the “right to be let alone”. In contemporary policy circles, however, this definition bumps up against further issues around what constitutes public or private space; and a need to protect the integrity of the body. As the Google case indicates, data protection is not the sole issue that privacy policy has to deal with: privacy of behaviour and action; communication. “Body characteristics” (biometrics) also come into play. Technologies that collect, process, store and disseminate personal data are developing rapidly and becoming ubiquitous: think of the fitness tracker that knows rather a lot about where you go running; or the social network platform that can link together tagged pictures of your face with details of where you went to school.