Cheating Hubby, UFOs, Black Sites

CHEATER

I came across this little gem this morning. The Sun reports a scandal in Britain involving a nosy woman's recent discovery of her husband's car outside the home of a new female acquaintance. The cheating hubby just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Google's Street View Mobile rolled by taking snap shots for the new internet program launched last year.

Aside from the obvious infringement on privacy rights this scandal so brilliantly illustrates, I'm interested in how Google Streetview opens up a whole lot of new possibilities for consumerism, blackmail, advertising, and other forms of accumulation. Are we going to have to start Google Streetviewing all of the possible locations we've been to in every city around the world to make sure we're not spotted doing anything shady? Are we then going to have to contact Google begging for them to remove our images? At what cost? It's already pretty crazy that Google has access to most of my e-mails, this blog, all of my gChats, the documents I've backed up for my senior project, and is also working on compiling a comprehensive collection of printed matter.

I wonder if there are any Google Streetview watchdog teams out there who alert others that the van is rolling through to take some photos. I also wonder if any businesses have tried to exploit Google Streetview for advertising their products and services.

Also on the Sun website and linked with this article is an entry on an alleged UFO sighting in East London on Streetview. Here's the link JIC:

ALIENS

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Another piece that might interest some of you is Mark Danner's recent piece in the New York Review on secret prisons and torture. It's very very disturbing and extremely well-written. I highly recommend it. In certain parts of the piece he cites interviews with ex-inmates who spent months and in some cases years not knowing which country they were in. I think it's pretty wild to try to conceptualize being in a place that you think might be Afghanistan, Poland or Cuba and just not having any idea.