The world is filled with great ironies. Here is one of them.
Google, a company unrivaled at invading privacy, does not want to be watched while it works.
Here is the background.
This great innovator of search, which knows so much about what we do on the Internet, knows every word we write in our Gmails, provides the world with pictures of our homes and streets and shares everything it knows about us with the government and any marketer willing to pay, soon will visit the campus setting where I work.
In its desire to record everything there is to record, Google crews will photograph the thoroughfares within the campus and also enter buildings to map interior hallways.
The first they do with backpack-mounted multi-directional cameras; the second with GPS enabled smart phones.
Prior to the visit, an email was sent by my employer to all employees alerting them to the presence of Google crews and asking us to honor a request not to disturb them. That’s reasonable, but it went on to ask us not to photograph them, which is less reasonable, nor even to watch them, which is absurd.
Don’t watch, we were instructed.
Google may have a host of non-ironic reasons for this request, but they were not shared and I can’t think of even one.
It brought to mind those horror movies where monsters plead, “Look away! I’m hideous!”
With each passing day I realize that the Internet, with all its wonder and potential, with its ability to better lives, improve society and educate the masses, has degenerated into the world’s greatest con game. It provides us with the things we desire in exchange for our souls and the inner workings of our brains. Google does this so that it and many, many others can make money.
After receiving the email, I was at first tempted to protest the directive and watch.
But now I’ve decided to take the opposite approach. When this hideous thing enters campus, I’m going to – as requested — look away.
By Lanny Morgnanesi
NotebookM 
I wish you could repost this article all over the Internet. I will post it on Facebook and Twitter.
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Thanks for your help spreading the word.
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Many of us have given away our privacy, willingly, by joining all kinds of social networking sites and posting everything about ourselves online. While some of this activity is required by employers, not all of it is. Complaints about the loss of privacy seem a bit odd to me in light of how people use the Internet for everything under the sun.
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Thanks, Ellie. We know not what we do.
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the reason they dont want you to watch is because when someone looks up directions to a place they don’t want to see some stranger staring at them while they browse through the city view trying to see which turns to take to get to their destination. this is just common sense. logic. i also was baffled why you blogged about some 5 hour thing about you pretending to be homeless while going inside restaurants and trying to get wifi on your iphone. homeless people dont do this. it was so , whatever the word for rude and obnoxious is, thats the word. you can’t pretend to step into the shoes of someone while blatantly ignoring th realities of it. your motto was “lets pretend to be homeless while spending money to try to kill time and read books for hours, etc” . i was homeless for a few months and it’s more difficult than you think, I know many people are homless for years but my months compared to your hours, it just baffles me how you can be so pretentious
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