Spying on people in the name of . . .


. . . what, exactly?

Progress? Maps? Searchability?

Or just sheer nosiness?

Item:

After months of negotiation, Johannes Caspar, a German data protection official, forced Google to show him exactly what its Street View cars had been collecting from potentially millions of his fellow citizens. Snippets of e-mails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, postings on Web sites and social networks — all sorts of private Internet communications — were casually scooped up as the specially equipped cars photographed the world’s streets.

“It was one of the biggest violations of data protection laws that we had ever seen,” Mr. Caspar recently recalled about that long-sought viewing in late 2010. “We were very angry.”

NYT story.

Imagine the uproar if the government did this?

Different? Maybe - until the government obtains the information . . . or Google becomes the government.