Get street wise – Big Brother is googling you

Privacy campaigners have made a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner about the service, saying that blurring of number plates and faces is insufficient to protect individual anonymity.

Personally, I can't imagine for a nanosecond what use anyone could conceivably make of Street View, unless it was something nefarious or criminal. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, assures us that the service's success proves that people "love to see what is going on in their local community". Can he really believe that it's better to do this online, rather than simply walk out the front door? Because that's what I, in my hokey old way, call a street view.

Indeed, why should you have to spend any time online at all - because what the Googlisation of the world means is that necessarily more and more of us have to spend increasing amounts of time in a virtual world; and while we're there, trying to stop invasions of our privacy, our personal data is being uploaded still more into Big Brother's databases.

I've been to the Google "campus" in California's Silicon Valley, where I gave a lecture on the psychology of place. Like most visitors, I was struck by the kidult feel of the organisation - lunch was in a vast salad bar, decorated with models made from household junk, while the offices were brightly painted in primary colours. When I came to give my lecture, most of the 40-strong audience weren't looking at me but tapping away on their laptops. Needless to say, I refused to speak unless they desisted, and found - to my surprise - that when I had their attention they were perfectly civil people.

But then that's the thing about Big Brother: he's not just big - he's also your older sibling, with all the care that this implies. Moreover, like most younger brothers and sisters, we look up to our big brother. That Google is an aspect of a Big Brother surveillance society that is insidiously coming to dominate our society, and which has the potential to be abused for the worst possible kind of repression, I have absolutely no doubt. That we not only acquiesce in this but even assist it, is because we too are lulled into thinking it's all play and no work.

Google provides us, gratis, with an amazing internet search engine; it maps our globe. Google is also in the process of trying to make available almost everything that is published globally, online. All of these boons lead us to love Big Brother. See how benign he is, we think, how much he wants to educate us and help us find our way home.

But don't be fooled, in the last analysis Big Brother remains Big Brother, and his key attribute is that he's watching you.

Just walk my way, Michelle

The lovely Michelle Obama will no doubt accompany her husband to London for the G20 summit of world leaders next week. Some people have been wondering what Ms Obama will get up to while hubby is saving world capitalism in the Excel Centre — after all, Canning Town isn't exactly a sightseeing destination. But I have faith in Michelle: I'm sure she'll want to walk the mean streets of one of Britain's most deprived areas, and I'm just the fellow to show her. She may be the First Lady but, when it comes to the red carpet reception, I'm the last in line. And if she wants to tread where ordinary Londoners go, I'd be happy to escort her.

Hacked off with Hackney

To the Purcell Room for an evening of readings, films and music to celebrate the publication of Iain Sinclair's magisterial account of his manor: Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. I did my turn, Rachel Lichtenstein showed a film of her uncle, a Jewish barber who snipped off the Mile End Road, Michael Rosen declaimed some poems, Sinclair himself read from the book to the accompaniment of John Harle's piercingly strange soprano saxophone.

The evening would have seemed merely evocative of another era — when the avant-garde still meant something — were it not that Iain has been barred from making appearances in Hackney libraries and council venues due to his spirited opposition to the Olympic boondoggle. When a writer of Sinclair's stature is forced to seek asylum on the South Bank, you know there must really be something rotten in the state of Stratford Marsh.