Google Street Views: Big Brother is Watching You (Get Drunk and Pass out on Mom's Lawn)

We live in a confessional world, at least that is what some complete stranger whispered in our ear before the threat of a macing moved him to another seat on the bus.

And what good's a confession if there is nobody there to hear it? [Guest Editor Christopher Hitchen's aside: If God is omniscient, isn't confessing redundant?]

A confessional world could not have developed without its twin evil, the Mary-Kate Olsen to its Ashley--voyeurism.

It's one thing to read accounts of someone's seedy life on a blog, it's another thing entirely to watch it unfold, and it's probably best where the twain meet.

Google Aerial Maps, initially showed us the promise of being able to zoom in on your neighbor's hot polka dot bikini-clad wine-drunk mistress, before privacy advocates put the kibosh on it. Similar concerns however, have not been directed toward the increasingly popular Google Street Views.

We are guessing that a line is drawn, and one that is rendered quite blurry squinting at it through Aerial View, between the clearly private and the public sphere. However the following near-encroachment onto a person's private property has called this distinction into question, with some of those same privacy concerns raised.

Australia, much like it was in our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery is again at the center of drunken shenanigans, with the resigning of two Qantas flight attendants (reporters were unclear if they were on board during the recent ill-fated hole in the fuselage flight) for drunkenly pulling the fire alarm at a 5-star hotel.

However, it is a drunken Aussie fisherman who passed out on his mother's lawn and was captured on Google Street Views who has raised the ire of their Privacy Foundation.

Some make the claim that if sans Google, someone had happened by, (and rather than asking the man if he needed help, though the Samaritan issue is a different one entirely), drew lines (or put something else) on his face and taken an embarrassing photo, this would be no different, however others question how every public action, no matter how 'public', is scrutinized either by some indifferent corporation, or in the case of many downtown intersections, by more snapping pictures than backstage at the AVN Awards.

Whatever happened to the good old days of balconies and telescopes?

At the risk of betraying an editorial bias in our headline, we do side with the privacy advocates in this case but only marginally so, as without public shaming our tome of drunken exploits could not have come about (and we are equally aware of the irony of holding this position when we've decided to disseminate the poor bastard's photo all over the blogosphere). Hey, it's a gray issue.