In yesterday’s Washington Post, I was interested to read the article, “Google’s Street View Takes A Byte Out Of Crime,” that highlighted how Massachusetts law enforcement turned to Google’s online mapping system to help identify the location of a missing child. Stop Internet Predators applauds the efforts of law enforcement in safely recovering the missing child and commends Street View for assisting in the recovery.
In this spirit, we’re hopeful Google takes the added step of removing images of children from Street View. There’s value to these online tools for sure, but there’s still risk in including children’s images in front of homes, schools and parks—especially without parental consent.
Removing such images won’t prevent law enforcement from relying on this tool to protect and serve its communities, but it will have the added benefit of assuring parents their children aren’t being featured on Google’s popular new tool.