Woman Googles Cheating Husband

Forget about Big Brother; Google (GOOG) is watching.

In London, a wife used Google’s Street View service to snoop on a house where she suspected her husband was tom-catting around.

The London Sun reports: “The hubby had claimed he was away on business but his missus recognized his motor immediately because of the blinged-up hubcaps.”

Google’s 360-degree photo search now covers 25 cities in England and the hubby-with-the-blinged-up hubcaps isn’t the only Lothario to be nailed. Divorce attorneys say they’ve gotten several cases recently where Google’s Internet photo service snared a wayward spouse.

One attorney told the British tabloid newspaper, “People are getting caught out on Google.”

Street View launched on March 20 in England amid yelps about privacy invasion and calls for the service to be shut down. In the US, cries of “Google, don’t tread on me” have failed. A Pennsylvania couple sued Google, claiming it had driven onto their private driveway to get pictures of their home. A Federal judge dismissed the case, saying photographs taken from the outside revealed nothing that a passerby can’t see from the street.

But some are uneasy about the new technology. Here’s why: Speaking at a conference, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that a Google tekkie told attendees, “Nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice...There isn't any privacy, get over it."

Google Street View has many of the capabilities George Orwell imagined in 1984, a novel about a totalitarian state that keeps everyone under complete surveillance.

Fretting about IP addresses and Internet “cookies” is now old hat. There are numerous Internet sites that allow users to conduct background checks, asset verification and criminal record reviews for about $40. In many states, it’s a snap to search property ownership, civil judgments and driving records. Home address, physical descriptions and, in some cases, pictures of individuals are easy to find.

Many companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and Apple (AAPL), have established privacy policies, but technology may be continually out-pacing good intentions.

There are also malicious intentions. A 10-month investigation found about 1300 computer systems in 103 nations had been spied on. Circumstantial evidence suggests China may be involved in the use of a spyware program used to steal confidential records, control Web cams and even control infected computers.

In 1984, Orwell wrote:

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Yeah, yeah - that’s Never-Never Land stuff and drives civil libertarians nuts. But using Google Street View to nail wandering husbands, well, that’s taking this Internet thing too far.
Cheating lovers of the world, unite!



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