Privacy Wins in a Photo Finish

For the time being, thanks to the legal sensitivity of Supervisor Todd Spitzer, the lens cap has been put on the aerial camera that county supervisors contracted to photograph every square mile of Orange County.

The two-year, $184,000 contract was unanimously approved by the board last month. The supervisors liked the idea of having 60,000 high-resolution photographs taken from an aircraft 4,000 feet overhead to put into the county database so that anyone could just call up the photos to view any part of the county.

The problem is that the board just didn’t look at the big picture.

In its eagerness to approve the project, the board never stopped to think about who that someone might be and what part of the county would be so readily accessible to view.

It wouldn’t be just streets that police and firefighters could call up in emergency situations, or that planners could use in working on land-use issues. Also on record would be the homes and backyards of residents’ private property. And to make residents even more uneasy, the supervisors were unanimous on how they could pay for the project: sell photos of the neighborhoods on the Internet.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution did their work at a time when the latest technology was a quill pen. But they had the foresight a couple of hundred years before the high-tech era to provide protection far into the future. The 4th Amendment gave people the right to be secure in their houses.

Residents reacted to the board’s decision, and Spitzer wisely brought the issue back for a second look. Supervisors have ordered a staff review of the legal ramifications, and a report is due back to the board in several weeks.

The contract has been approved. But what is missing are the protections for the public and protocols that set out how the pictures could be used.

We leave the constitutional questions on a person’s privacy and right to be let alone to lawyers. But before any pictures are taken, the county board must ensure that strict guidelines to protect the public are spelled out--and enforced.

Spitzer envisions using the pictures for planning and public safety. That seems reasonable. But selling photos to telemarketers and making them available on the Internet, if not a legal invasion of privacy, certainly crosses the line of intruding on residents’ peace of mind.