Google’s New All-Seeing Satellites Have Huge Potential—For Good and Evil
Google’s New All-Seeing Satellites Have Huge
Potential—For Good and Evil
BY MARCUS WOHLSEN
06.11.14 | 6:30 AM
The reach of Google’s online empire is hard to overstate.
In a sense, the Google search engine is the loom through which the entirety of
the public internet is woven. With tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, and
Google Docs, the company also handles many of our private online tasks. Using
the data generated by these services to target online ads, Google has built a
business that generates tens of billions of dollars a year.
Now, with the $500 million purchase of Skybox, a startup
that shoots high-res photos and video with low-cost satellites, Google can
extend its reach far across the offline world. Thanks to its knack for
transforming mass quantities of unstructured data into revenue-generating
insights, the unprecedented stream of aerial imagery to which the company is
gaining access could spark a whole new category of high-altitude insights into
the workings of economies, nations, and nature itself.
But this acquisition will also demand assurances from
Google that it will incorporate privacy safeguards into its vast new view of
the world. Already Google gets a lot of flack for tracking user behavior
online. With Skybox’s satellites, Google may gain a window into your everyday
life even if you don’t use Google at all.
Really Big Data
In his WIRED feature story on Skybox, David Samuels
describes some of the stunning ways high-resolution images shot from space are
being used to unlock secrets about life on the ground. One company is tracking
cars in parking lots to create retail forecasts. Images of pits and slag heaps
reveal the productivity of mines. Pictures of property damage from above can
tell insurance companies whether a claim is valid.
“Many of the most economically and environmentally
significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from
shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to
turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken
from space,” Samuels writes. “So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet
and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer
behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped
source of data–information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep
secret–is hanging in the air right above us.”
In a statement, Google has said that, in the short term,
it plans to use Skybox’s satellites to keep Google Maps up to date. And, in the
future, the company says, it could use them to help spread internet access to
remote areas, something that will help improve the reach of its existing
services. But imagine all the other things Google could do turns its artificial
intelligence expertise onto a constant stream of images beamed down from above.
One Skybox insider told Samuels that satellite images
alone could be used to estimate any country’s major economic indicators. Take,
for example, this Skybox case study of Saudi oil reserves measured from space.
Now consider the insights that could come from marrying that visual data with
Google’s Knowledge Graph, leveraging all the company’s algorithmic might. Google
could learn all kinds of new things about the world.
Military-Industrial Ties
But it could also learn all kinds of new things about
you. Skybox can take photos from 500 miles up with a sub-one-meter resolution
of the ground below. That isn’t not likely to sit well with privacy activists
who already don’t trust Google. What does the right to be forgotten mean when
Google can always see you anyway?
Skybox’s pedigree likely won’t help assuage anyone who
likes a good conspiracy theory. According to Samuels, one of the company’s
co-founders, John Fenwick, had previously worked as a liaison in Congress for
the National Reconnaissance Office, “the ultrasecret spy agency that manages
much of America’s most exotic space toys.” A major investor had worked as an intelligence
officer in the French army, while its CEO held previous jobs that brought him
into close contact with the Department of Defense.
That’s not to suggest there’s anything nefarious about
Skybox or its intentions. It’s hard to get anything into space without entreé
into government and military circles. But Skybox CEO Tom Ingersoll told Samuels
that the government is interested in his company’s imagery.
“In the end,” Samuels writes, “the government will likely
commandeer some of Skybox’s imaging capabilities under terms similar to those
imposed on other vendors.” With Google now involved, that begins to sound a lot
like the NSA commandeering the internet servers to spy on U.S. citizens.
Skybox or Skynet?
Even if a network of high-powered imaging satellites
could give Google the power to track an individual from space, it probably
wouldn’t. Setting aside any legal or moral constraints, there’s just no
percentage in it. Monetizable insights of the kind that would interest Google
or companies willing to pay Google for access to that data are derived from
observing patterns and populations, not individuals. As geeks of all varieties
are fond of pointing out, n=1 is a terrible sample size.
If Google finds ways of using these satellites that ends
up making users’ lives more interesting and convenient, most people are
unlikely to object, just like revelations of NSA surveillance haven’t exactly
dented Gmail’s market share. But people may find the idea of Google looking
down from the heavens on their physical selves more discomfiting than peering
through their browsers at their virtual personas. After all, putting an
all-seeing Google eye in space gives a whole new meaning to “do not track.”
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