Surveillance in searching A study into ethical aspects of an emergent search culture

This paper offers an ethically, philosophically and sociologically founded study of privacy in a digital environment of transformed humanness. The focus is on emergent trends in search technology, in particular Google’s powerful search engine, which contributes to the distribution and “stretching” of human life by making unsorted information available through keyword and -phrase searches. The prominence of searching in human everyday life is brought about by a mutually strengthening combination of several developments, including technological advancements and constantly growing amounts of information. In recent years, we have witnessed a “search war” similar to the renowned “browser wars” of the 1990’s, and this battle between giants like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft has spun off a number of specialized search opportunities. One of the most thought-provoking developments is the possibility to search and browse satellite images using e.g. Google Earth or MSN Virtual Earth. By combining already available satellite imagery, these tools facilitate visual surveillance, and the potential of this technology – in a future when (more or less) live feeds from satellites might become an option for private individuals – is to allow searching and zooming in very detailed, up-to-date maps thus exposing everything that can be seen from above. In this paper I will map and study ethical problems and dilemmas that appear in the wake of emergent search technologies, and a number of questions will be raised: What are the ethical issues and consequences of both “traditional” and specialized searching? How does searching become surveillance, and what are the relations between the two? How will the new “flows” of (personal) information alter the conception of private and public space? The paper is divided into two main parts: Firstly, the rise of searching as an integral part of human life will be discussed with particular reference to Google’s search engine. Secondly, the expanding of searching to zooming will be studied, i.e. searching in satellite images using recent search technology; here I will focus on Google Earth.