To talk about what people “actually” do with the images floating around our Google Street Views, well, sometimes a bit of art. Street art artist Paolo Cirio creates real-life replicas of people captured by Google’s Street View cars, then pastes them into the locations they were photographed. The Italian artist blows up, then prints out the Google images, then visits the precise spot they were captured by the Street View car. Using wheat paste, he glues their life-sized likenesses to where they appear on Google Maps, creating an ephemeral feedback loop between the on- and offline world. Right now, the ghosts have only been found in New York, London and Berlin.
Privacy matters are not that big for him, yet I wonder what might stir up the moment people start realizing to what purposes their images are being used for through Google Street Views, especially in New York City.
