Amnesty (again) and Google...and blogging ethics!

There is an interesting article on Amnesty's activities (mainly in Australia) before Beijing here. It also links to something that we all think about nowadays and touches upon privacy issues - Google Street Mapping. (see Stilgherrian's post). I would be very interested to hear what you think. On Twitter opinions are skeptical, still I personally have nothing against it - we do live in CCTV age and if I need to loose a bit of my own privacy but gain on my security - I would agree - I think I agreed long time ago, actually. The thought of having on-line view of my flat windows available doesn't scare me - mine faces one of the main squares of our little town, other one of the main paths. (I would be interested to know what EU and UK law states about privacy in Google's case though. Any lawyers around?)Browsing around all those Amnesty sites I have found an interesting guide to blogging (fresh, March 2008, great graphics btw) including few notes on ethics written by Dan Gillmor (interested in privacy issues, as far as I can see) , who finds basis for blogging ethics in journalism: 'There are pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, transparency and independence.'I thing it's a valid point - according to Fromm, there are two types of ethics - modern ethics (due to the commercialism and tolerance based development of societies this set of rules is based on our subjective judgments, i.e. code of ethics must be agreed on by majority of us) or traditional ethics (set of rules given by superior 'powers' - however we define those - always objective). If we want to follow modern approach, we still need traditional (journalistic) point of view at least to start developing our own codes of blogging ethics.

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