Reading an interesting section in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) on Google's cycle of dispossession, which is essentially how they normalize taking away our choices of privacy in every space they enter. It focuses on Google Street View and how it began with a celebration of public space while simultaneously making the argument that we have a different expectation of privacy when we use them.

This is a tricky bit of work they're doing here; essentially trying to equate the eyes on the street notion of public life with the use of surveillance tech. But these are very different things, especially in the hands of a company like Google. Jacobs' eyes on the street is about establishing a shared sense of ownership for public space. When a place is used by people, it creates a sort of social safety net in which strangers are tied together by an unspoken common goal. They are the eyes of the collective stranger—the community—whose gaze is not salacious but watchful.

The use of surveillance tech in the public realm is something that has bothered me for a while. It's driven not by a shared responsibility of protecting the common good but the individual desire to protect private interests. One builds communal trust, the other tears it down.

Google's attempt to claim access to the public realm is similarly compelled by their private interests. These eyes on the street are not watchful, nor are they communal. They are the exploitative gaze of a company who harvests our behaviours for their own benefit, indifferent to what makes a shared space good.